Être en commun : this first brought to my mind Husserl’s phenomenology, according to which the individual as a separate or autonomous entity doesn’t even exist. Rather, we are always already in a relationship with the other a priori. That seems about right to me: alone, I am nothing, no one. Most people grow up in a family, and it is there that we’re supposed to learn how to function socially. To the degree that children fail to learn, for whatever reason, how to be with others in their families, they will not function well in society later on. That’s the idea, more or less, right?
I indeed grew up in a family, with three brothers and two parents, until my father left us when I was about ten. My parents were, frankly, pretty weird, both of them, so that’s certainly part of the story for me. Really strange, but at the same time not in an interesting way (to me), which is not so easy to pull off, they walked a dull razor’s edge so to speak. Really I have no clue what they were trying to do. They came out of nowhere, didn’t really fit together, made me feel like an alien most of the time, while I was a child my mother cooked for me, it’s true, my father paid for my accommodation, and they faded away without a word. I looked each of them in the eyes when they lay dying, and they said exactly nothing. Yeah, fuck you too you cunts, I said to myself (I don’t speak like that out loud to the dying), I can go nuts by myself you know. At the same time, though, neither of them was mean, that’s something already. But, generally, to me there was certainly always a sense in which we, as a family, just didn’t make it. We looked more or less like a family from the outside I suppose, but from within it felt more like stumbling through dense fog on the frozen tundra, you never knew whether anybody was there or not, is this my brother or some random bison breathing down my neck? It’s as if we couldn’t mobilize the necessary energy to ignite the family vibe and fashion it into something sustainable, like a plant that won’t take root, not enough oxygen, not enough chlorophyll, bad DNA, rejected by the earth. I’ve always carried this with me, the feeling that I’m not properly part of the game, an impostor of a human, and I shouldn’t be here, I’m not legitimately part of the world. Now I’m fifty-two and the world and I are like old foes spotting each other across the room at a gala evening: what the fuck is she doing here? Except we meet all the time, all the time. We’re used to it of course, it’s become an inside joke, we tease each other over the heads of oblivious dinner guests, mouthing things like hey why don’t you come over and sit on my face you cunt?
I’ve tried to fit in, though. I tried to live with my wife, for instance, she is a wonderful person, and with my son, who is also a wonderful person. I held on for years, I tried to make it work, but at some point a few years ago I moved out, into a small space of my own around the corner, because being together even with lovely people all the time is apparently impossible for me. There were plenty of nice moments, beautiful moments, I would never want to miss those, but I suffered, and I made everyone around me suffer. I can’t have people in my face from the moment I wake up if I feel like ripping my own damn eyes out because...because that’s how I feel when I wake up sometimes, what do I know about why? I’ve been this way for too long. So yeah, now we do the living-apart-together thing, it’s much better. My son is twenty-two now and doesn’t want to see much of me anymore, he’s had enough. It’s sad but I don’t blame him, and it’s courageous because he’s right, I’m just so difficult a lot of the time. My wife thinks that it’s worthwhile spending time with me nonetheless sometimes, I’m incredibly lucky, she finds me interesting. I’ve never bored her she says, plus I can also be nice from time to time, I can be pretty nice in fact if I put my fucked-up mind to it. And so damn funny!
It was suggested to me a few months ago, precisely on the strength of my impressive social ineptitudes, that I might be on the autism spectrum. High-functioning autism, because my IQ is above seventy, etc., so I went and checked some books out of the library, found some online sources. It fairly blew my mind, because I ticked a lot of the boxes: difficulties evaluating social signals? Check! Anxiety in social situations? Of course, check! Difficulties understanding social norms and rules? Oh yeah! Inappropriate social reactions (oversharing/stonewalling)? Both! Big time! On and on like that, you get the idea. I have, in a way, not been the same since, even though I don’t even know what it all means. Saying that this behaviour is a hardwired disorder, however, is that not a just a way of pretending I’m not responsible for being an asshole? Sure I have little empathy, I’m oversensitive, self-centred, socially awkward, I can get angry really fast, I can be totally emotionless, but it’s a neural thing, I can’t change it, and just so you know it’s untreatable too. I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I don’t even want a diagnosis if that is what it leads to.
And here’s another problem: most of the men I know, if not all, easily seem to be somewhere on the spectrum too. And if you care to extrapolate somewhat, isn’t it just this cold, inhumane way of looking at the world, and at others, that modernism was all about? You can call it a scientific or objective perspective, but it’s also just a heartless, emotionlesscold attitude that European men foisted on the entire world pretending it was the shit and then fucking absolutely everything up in the process.[1] Absolutely everything. René Descartes as patient zero, immediately dropping some BS theory to scientifically prove hey it’s not me, it’s the world that’s split in two, it’s not my mistake, it’s the pineal gland, it’s the res cogitans, it’s modernism, my head is exploding,[2] let’s enslave some Africans! I don’t know, but whatever the case, I’m sure Descartes didn’t clean his own toilet, that might have grounded him. Always clean your own toilet, I say, especially while you’re meditating on what is absolutely certain in this world.
And all this sitting at computers all day, pretending that’s the really important work we have to do, that will save the world, it plays straight into the hand of exactly this nefarious Cartesian dualism: what happens in the mind is what matters, the ideas, concepts, theories that we exchange with other enlightened people around the world with our little computers and telephones. Work that requires physical work is best left to lesser humans, i.e. women and darker-skinned people. We no longer say this out loud, but just look at who cleans the toilets of this world, for instance. This argument could be greatly expanded and supplemented, and I’m not the first to make it, but it does bear repeating. So that’s a neat hypothesis: ASD as the ossification of modernist ideals. It’s perfectly in line with Darwin too: you push one set of characteristics for long enough and it will establish itself among the population and become dominant. But I’m not saying this is the case. Hardcore autism is no joke. These are just thoughts that came up, and reality is always messier than our thoughts. And: maybe Descartes did clean his own toilet, what do I know?.
At any rate, the young are doing a far better job than we did, I find. I am a bit wary of some of these young guys, my fear is that the female-inspired clothes and makeup etc. are just another excuse not really to evolve, just camouflage (and, possibly, just another instance of ravenous appropriation), but I’m usually at least half-wrong, I’m probably projecting and/or jealous. Also, some of these dudes simply do look gorgeous.
*
Do you have to be structurally oppressed to see meaning in life? It’s a serious question. I sometimes think that that’s why white men keep inventing fantasies of being oppressed: to wrest a semblance of meaning from life. The extreme attachment to, and identification with, football clubs might have something to do with this: so many opponents to fight! (If you’re interested in this question, I recommend Nietzsche’s polemic On the Genealogy of Morality.) But I’ve always found that being privileged, if you take it seriously, is a lonely game, precisely because there are no opponents. You can’t coalesce against a common enemy where there is none. Maybe, I sometimes think, that’s why you always see men standing around looking lost, staring at the comings and goings on a construction site for hours, for instance, or at parked motorcycles or at camera shop windows, with forlorn longing in their eyes. This has always mystified me. The other day, I saw a very stern-looking young white dude walking ahead of me on the street, head shaved, combat boots, military cargo pants and a t-shirt emblazoned with a big skull and the words “Pride or Die Fight Club.” I scrutinized him out of the corner of my eye at a red light. In truth, he looked not unlike myself in my earlier years (I did shave my head for a while, and I certainly always had a serious facial expression). I later checked online and it turns out that there is no such club at all, all you can do is buy those shirts on some website that has no other content, which to me just made the whole thing abysmally tragic, and I wished I had reached out to the guy, though how I don’t even know: but no one is out to hurt your pride, my friend, and you will die anyway, there is no fight, and, I’m really sorry, there is not even a club. It’s sadder than being a football hooligan. To me, if there is such a thing as being a real man, it means: you have everything, so just shut up and go home. The world doesn’t owe it to you to make sense. I mean this sincerely: it takes nerves of steel to be maximally privileged. It might in fact be impossible without alcohol. But if that’s true, then to be a real man, to me, is also to drink in silence. Maybe play the banjo if you have to make noise, but play it well, no one wants to hear a drunk white man making ugly sounds, there’s far too much of that already. And: if you can, try to be nice, just try to be kind.
*
I don’t know how we ended up here, and I don’t really care. Intentionality, that cornerstone of the modernist worldview, kills all the fun. Still, I’m sure there was something I had to say. I accepted to write this out of vanity, no doubt, also I don’t know how to say no. But the truth is so hard to express in words.
I’ll put it this way: some songs can make me cry. I don’t personally know the musicians involved, and the story that the lyrics tell might otherwise strike me as trite and hackneyed, yet I break out in tears. It’s in the timbre of the voice, the chord progression, it’s a mystery, but I, neurodiverse or not, am deeply moved. I’ll not tell you which songs they are, but my point is this: I don’t know what it is that goes on between people, but it isn’t nothing, and when it’s good, to me it is what makes life worth living.
[1] Check out this article: “Map: European Colonialism Conquered Every Country in The World but these Five:” https://www.vox.com/2014/6/24/5835320/map-in-the-whole-world-only-these-five-countries-escaped-european.
[2] I’m not making this up: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5886445/.
David Russon (1971) is a visual artist of German-English origin who has been living in Brussels for 18 years. Though mainly a painter who has exhibited his work widely, his practice also includes writing, illustration, photography and performance work. David further holds a BA in philosophy and takes a keen interest in observing, and dissecting, the dynamics of popular culture.