2011-09-02

autism/human face metaphor

I wrote the following in the 1990s :
"Those without internal faces - that is, those whose internal face is inaccessible to their original·will - cannot speak.

There is only one true cure - not to force speech out of disconnected face - but rather to produce (with a third eye) the conceived,enlightened face; which can come shimmering up from seeming nothingness like Athena was said to have done (out of the foaming ocean) (as one of the voices of God
)."
I posted this on the internet around 1999  on a page titled "autism and the human face". I was not being literal.

Reading it aloud now it has a kind of snap, a frisson of something that might be true.

Funny thing, I had got my Greek goddesses mixed up. It was Aphrodite who was born out of the foaming ocean.

Athena's birth? Well, Zeus (the god of gods) had headaches, and she finally burst out of his head. As wisdom! As empowered!

I was suggesting then, and am saying it explicitly now, that this myth is not so much about a father and daughter, but much more about competence arising from something like developmental disability.

I am also suggesting the genders are not significant in this myth. Note that someone has rendered Athena's birth gendered-reversed. (the meaning of myth is what other people think about it).


P.S.
By "original will' I meant my opinion that children choose their own personality from the ephemera of existence
just as they are understanding dimensionality and time.