The navigational flight-paths of Selene dePackh and I first crossed when we discovered that we had both been approached by brain banks, requesting posthumous study of the sweet, strange yolk inside the shell of skull. From that point forward, additional conversation has felt mandatory. How many of us are there – queer, neurodivergent, and a thousand other known and unknown, celebrated and censored states of being – whose post-mortem brains fetch a tangible price in the marketplace for scientific research?
In the murmuration below, we fly through these and other skies.
Selene dePackh is a queer, physically disabled neurodivergent who forefronts marginalized characters in her writing. She’s been a visual artist most of her professional life; her credits include the cover illustration and design for The Biopolitcs of Disability by Mitchell & Snyder.
Her novel Troubleshooting (Glitch in the System series) has been taught in several Disability Studies programs across the country. Kirkus says of it and its narrator, “There are few protagonists in sci-fi—or literature in general—that present an autistic perspective with such specificity and pathos. The explorations of ableism and sexuality in a claustrophobic cyberpunk setting make this unlike anything most readers will have encountered before.”
Her genre-fluid noir short fiction has recently or will soon in appear in the anthologies Spoon Knife, SYNTH#2, Recognize Fascism and Nightside Codex as well as Weird Whispers magazine. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in the Identities issue of Shooter, and Heavy Feather Review.
And, dear readers – welcome. If you’d like to participate, please send us a note.
Be aware – there is much in this murmuration that may require a fuller research on your part, such as the Harvard Brain Bank, DTRA, Aktion T4, and other institutions, programs, and locations. Rather than providing links, SCRY is happy to offer agency to you to look it up yourself. The ethical statement behind this is that too often, the othered are expected to explain ourselves. Well, SCRY doesn’t feel like doing that today. And neither do I.
– Quintan Ana Wikswo
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SCRY: We have found common terrain in neurological rabbitholes – the one that springs to mind is the random (or not?) discovery on social media that both of us have been approached by brain harvesters. My brain is actually worth more than I am alive. I don’t know if you wrote that, or I did.
DEPACKH: I have as my Facebook page personal quote that as an autistic, I resent being worth more as a dissection specimen than alive. There’s a person in my adopted city who has been involved in shady things connected to a “youth facility” for neurodivergent misfits but who still gets abundant funding, promotes “art events” for compliant autistics, and stalks us without showing true colors.
This person has (or had as of a year ago, the last time I could stomach a search) a page on the Autism $peaks website outlining appropriate techniques for approaching parents for pre-mortem donation commitments (by written contract) of their children’s brains. Considering autistics have an average lifespan variously measured at 32 or 54 depending on the study, and a ninefold suicide rate, while A$ siphons funds away from services that might actually extend autistic lifespans and increase quality of life, it’s fertile ground they’re plowing. We call the ones who run the brain program the zombies, but the whole organization is vampiric.
SCRY: Yes. It is an underworld of predation upon neurodivergents that is operating in a kind of open secrecy. So much is problematic here – the fact that it is so out of the realm of believability is a major impediment to stopping this brain farming. When it happened to me, I gained no traction. I mentioned this to my parents, who refused to believe that I was approached. I found myself offended that they didn’t think my brain was worth studying, while I was also offended that I was not believed, while I was also offended that Harvard finds it acceptable to openly solicit the purchase of my brain. And then terrified that I could have – or might – lose agency over my brain because my parents could decide to do anything they wish with it, should I become sufficiently disabled.
I went to an attorney for an advance directive, which is something many of us need to know to do in order that our wishes be respected.
I am angry that I was so furious that I burned the letter. I wanted it far away from me. I never thought I’d need to produce it later as proof to others that I’m not lying.
And I think that that bundle of rather horrible and hideous juxtaposed thoughts form a lot of the discomfort I have around being disabled in this society – the fact that we are both valued and valued, believed and disbelieved. We are the Schrodinger’s Earthlings: simultaneously four incompatible states of being. It’s arguable that most communities targeted by normalizers are in this same situation. I think of the body souvenirs that have yet to be repatriated – or cannot be repatriated to their nations/peoples of origin.
The basement of the Vienna Anthropology Museum is filled with old banana boxes gathered by Nazis and kept in deep storage. When I made a film about it a few years ago, where the normalizers had cut little peepholes out of the banana boxes so that various femurs (exceptionally long) could fit into the carton, several prominent disability rights activists on faculty at UCLA told me that this was impossible because all the remains had been returned.
Thinking of myself as a member of a non-normalized community, and proudly if exhaustedly non-normalized, I wonder whether if our brains had to be in a jar, whose hands would we want to hold them? The hands of Schrödinger, perhaps?
DEPACKH: …or Schrödinger’s aliens. I forget exactly when we first began corresponding, but it was around then that the Carnegie Natural History Museum in my adopted city of Pittsburgh discovered that the head of a human figure in one of its most famous taxidermy exhibits, a wildly Edward Said-esque nightmare diorama of an Arab man on camelback being attacked by lions, was built on a purloined human skull. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-a-real-human-skull-in-a-museum-diorama
I’m hoping not to have my grave robbed before I’m in it.
SCRY: There is a phenomenon – there’s actually a word for it which I shall have to look up – of false graves. We all know by now, I’d reckon, that the consternation around obscured gravesites is a global issue. However, I am interested in my false lifespan, my false capacity. I feel oftentimes as a neurodivergent that I have been falsely buried. It is already assumed that I will commit suicide, due to statistics. It is already assumed, due to statistics, that I will die young.
Once upon a time, I had a then-step-mother-in-law. Let’s call her Ellen Grush. One Thanksgiving in rural Oregon, my then-partner and I were riding in the back seat of her car. She stopped the car, turned to me, and said, “Quintan, I have spent a great deal of time researching temporal lobe epilepsy and would like to make it very clear that we are aware that you will be in the mid- to late- stages of dementia by age 40. Owen and I have discussed that you will likely need to be institutionalized for full-time care by age 45. I want you to be aware that despite being married to our child, the family will not support this expense.”
Ellen was a polio survivor, and a psychologist. Owen, my then-father-in-law, was a diabetic and a psychiatrist. Ellen experienced post-polio complications for much of her life. Owen was frequently hospitalized for his own complications. Whether they self-identified as disabled, I do not know. But according to the medical establishment, they were disabled.
At sixty, they estimated her own lifespans to be near-infinite. Yet they had done the research and mathematical and financial calculations to know that I would need to be thrown to the wolves in about ten years time.
We assume that other disabled folks are our allies. And I have not found that to be the case, especially when it comes to institutions. You mention Autism Speaks, and there are four or five prominent epilepsy associations that are just as punitive, mercenary, and more enemy than advocate.
DEPACKH: Like any other marginalized group, the disability community can be divided along its fault lines of self-interest. The deepest fissure is opened by those who proudly assert that there’s “nothing wrong with their minds.”
That can rive me down my own fracture lines at times, given that I’m progressively physically disabled by Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a progressive connective tissue breakdown that rides the same genetic rung as autism and a seizure disorder that will get me eventually if my heart doesn’t split the way my dad’s did.
SCRY: Yes. The common co-occurence of seizure disorder in neurodivergence is disgracefully under-researched and mis-researched. I can’t help but add, since we’re discussing prominent institutions, that last week I had a seizure in the archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was escorted out in a wheelchair – but not without some consternation that I might have faked it all so I could steal things and hide them in a wheelchair.
It is perverse that simply living one’s life as neurodivergent, the normie cloud of suspicion, disbelief, disrespect, and distrust make even the simplest situations opaque and volatile.
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SCRY: Another rabbithole we have discovered, and I sense that we have deeper to go here, is that we are both the daughters of physicists from the Department of Defense and various advanced institutes and entities, who served in the Navy, who worked on radar systems, and the list goes on. Your father’s obituary contains a lot of common elements to my (living) father’s life, such as wildly prescient inventions.
I’d like to hear you talk about your father’s life. My father, with help of my tiny six year old fingers, discovered the magnetic field of the human nervous system, especially the heart. I was born at Stanford, in the hospital maybe a mile from SLAC, the Stanford Linear Particle Accelerator.
I do remember his SQUID magnetometer meant that after he’d extracted the nerves from a lobster brain, we could eat it for dinner. I grew up in his labs at Stanford and Vanderbilt, and various other places where he did collaborative work.
DEPACKH: My dad spent his entire working life at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He graduated the University of Chicago with an engineering degree at the age of 17 and was drafted directly into the Navy as part of the WWII weapons development effort.
He did travel extensively as part of his work and kept close contact with several colleagues at Livermore. He was invited to work with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos but turned it down for reasons of conscience, choosing instead to work on defensive radar systems during WWII.
SCRY: Our families’ paths very nearly crossed generations ago, then. Because many of my family in various branches of science worked under Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project. I scored very high on engineering tests as a high schooler but was very wary of the ethics of animal experiments, military work, and some of the values that would be at stake for me if I followed the family footsteps.
My great-aunt and -uncle and grandfather did not turn down Oppenheimer job offers. I think they thought it was the culmination of their intelligence and educational hard work. Muriel went on to some very distressing Uranium extraction projects as a highly placed Director at the US Atomic Energy Commission, and eventually directed much of what has now destroyed the ecologies of the Navajo Nation, and so on and so forth.
The destruction list goes on nearly infinitely, but I do believe that she (and my other family members working on the Manhattan Project) found it some of the most intellectually fulfilling work possible. The cost to the subsequent generations is a bit searing.
DEPACKH: It’s interesting that the biggest “risk” factor for autism is supposedly having an engineer for a parent. The neighborhoods in and around Cold War Era DC military/scientific facilities have been fertile breeding ground for my neuro-peers.
SCRY: I too continue to meet other children of parents who worked at Cold War sites, and the children of my father’s physicist peers. There is absolutely a thumbprint of neurodivergence – I lived near Los Alamos off and on for much of my life so that site in particular has brought me close to descendant children whose brains are very much like my own. I don’t think any of us have an easy time around the normalizing forces. One of whom, Peter Carillo Fuller, became a dear friend over many decades, like me had extensive neurodivergence, was brilliant, and committed suicide in the spring of 2007.
DEPACKH: NRL [Naval Research Lab] was fertile ground for my father—I don’t think there’s any way a person with his background could have the career he did now. He became head of the Electron Beams Branch there when I was quite young. I remember him working until 8PM, when he would come home for dinner, read to me before bed (first book Homer’s Odyssey, second David Copperfield, third Bullfinch’s Mythology)—and then go back to work.
He also showed me the magic of the darkroom, and gave me handtools, a soldering iron, etc.—these are what I owe him. Neither of us was comfortable with my being female as the thing was defined at the time. He was also diagnosed as what was then called manic depressive and would no doubt have been picked up on by the “early intervention” autism dragnet of today—whereupon he would have been subjected to forcible socialization and been stripped of his brilliance.
SCRY: I would say the same about my father, who also taught me basic electronics, soldering, welding, and how to use a men’s urinal because the physics building did not have a women’s bathroom.
He spent his teen years on an army cot in the physics labs because he had already earned his PhD from Stanford by 21. He was a child in college. I doubt he would have been seen as intelligent now, but instead most likely problematic, and dosed. He has a variety of unusual characteristics in his personality and had he been normalized, they would have all been wiped out. But perhaps the world we are in now needs scientists to be normalized as well as the rest of us, whereas before there were figures such as Einstein and others who could be strange, or active in politics in a way that academia no longer permits.
Civilians – much less non-scientists – will never know the extent to which these large corporate, government, and contracted universities collaborate with warfare, warfighting, and other Department of Defense programs. I cannot hazard a guess regarding how many scientists employed at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) or DTRA (Defense Threat Reduction Agency for weapons of mass destruction) and related agencies are uncompromised, but most are certainly fully aware that the research and development has questionable applications in terms of weapons application.
But it’s hard to know for certain where collaboration and opposition can be separated. In my experience, the lines can appear abruptly, and it is very difficult to navigate that boundary between what you might find professional compelling but ethically compromised. As a human rights fieldworker and strategist, first responder and program developer, I have walked away from far more assignments than I have accepted, and there was always a kind of nasty values aspect to those choices – the cognitive impact of determining one’s participation in highly complex systems in which millions of lives hang in the balance.
Making decisions that have mass destruction at stake – the life or death of strangers for perhaps hundreds of years in the future…it can be shattering.
That’s why there are so many sites for psychiatric care for workers of this nature. Not enough, I’d argue. I know many people who have been assigned to these mental health rehabilitation facilities in order to maintain security clearances, return to the field, or simply become functional. But I also know more who were quickly dispatched and ejected from the system, leaving them to manage their trauma without resources of any kind.
DEPACKH: My father went into his most drastic manic psychosis while at a CERN [European Organization for Nuclear Research] planning conference in Basel. After that he became more iconoclastic and finally lost his security clearance when he was arrested on the Justice Department steps protesting the Vietnam War.
He died at 68 on his own terms. Since then, a basilisk (the coat of arms of Basel, Switzerland) sometimes appears in my dreams to herald seismic changes in my life.
SCRY: Switzerland is horrifying for its cleanliness, which hides a wealth of dirty business. My Swiss basilisk is the bear in the pit in Bern, over top the CERN tunnels. It’s been there for thousands of years – each time the bear dies, another is sent down into the hole. I identified with this bear when I was at CERN. As Aimé Cesaire writes, Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing … a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear.
I was at CERN during its construction and your father’s response makes sense within that community. It is a place of power that is difficult to explain, much less comprehend. What’s emerging in our murmuration is the role of offspring, of generational anguish at these scientific sites.
There is a magic and a magical realism and a horror and an internal screaming with these fathers, and a sadness. Perhaps the same could be said of many of us, but I do think in physics it is a bit unique because as a child one has the sense that one’s father is in direct contact with a cosmos that is invisible and incomprehensible to others.
Probably more difficult in children of military research physicists. Where ethics have genocidal repercussions if not deeply considered. And where often the ends of their careers bring them to knowledge that makes it difficult to support life. Or, the desire to support life inadvertently – or necessarily – causes them to end lives.
As for the role of eerie generational impact at governmental scientific research sites – at CERN I was in a relationship with a dark matter physicist Dr. Vittorio Palmieri who was a project manager in the early days of CERN. We had unprotected sex in the particle collider before it was fully operational.
The morning afterwards he became terrified that if I got pregnant, the baby would be born with some sort of brain abnormality because of the work they were doing there. I was a bit disoriented by this, but said I was not going to prevent a pregnancy solely on the reason of the child having potential neurodivergence.
At first, I thought he was just being paranoid, and then, under the pretext of a nice trip to Geneva, he took me to a Swiss abortionist and they tried to force the morning after pill down my throat. And the outcome was that I fled, I faked my grandmother’s death certificate, and caught the next bereavement flight home to Philadelphia on Swiss Air, which kindly upgraded me and my conjecturally subhuman fetus to first class.
DEPACKH: I hope to hear the outcome.
SCRY: Well, I have no offspring, both by choice and by biology, but I am a rhizome. I doubt that’s human. At times, I have no desire to be considered human. And yet the alternative…we know humans are on a spectrum in which some of us are subhuman.
Years of Nazi-hunting and projects and research into Aktion T4 and Dr. Plecker and Dr. Priddy in Virginia and other eugenicists made that very clear. It’s a history we all know – most of us know – gracias to the Holocaust. But I’m not sure it’s fully explored what that means – and that includes what it means logically to the person who knows they are categorized as subhuman, but also what it feels like, and what the first- second- third-order consequences of that feeling-knowledge-experience matrix include.
Because there are consequences – maybe being sent to a special school, maybe having a fetus aborted without your consent, and the list goes on. But what are the strategies and tactics behind the indoctrination whereby some of us know that we are subhuman.
DEPACKH: I’ve had an instinctive response to this concept for most of my life, but when I was tapped by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (sister of Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder) to illustrate and design the cover of their book The Biopolitics of Disability, I began to learn the language and dialectic of it as a subject of study. So far as I know, the figure with CP I developed for that project remains the only accurate artistic (not medical) 3D model of a physically disabled person.
Around that time, I began to develop friendships in the online autistic community, where one often only learns that one’s conversation partner doesn’t use spoken language and requires an aide for basic functions days or months after one has made the initial acquaintance. My impression from talking to #actuallyautistic people who have dealt with the consequences of appearing to be barely sentient is that they have a profoundly different understanding of humanity.
To me, the ghastly descriptions of what autistic perception “must be like” that one can find in texts that are still used in training practitioners of Applied Behavior Analysis are written by people who lack a basic sense of empathetic humanity. This is an area where people who have been the subjects of this so-called therapy are actively shunned and denigrated by the profession that was developed to ostensibly serve them when they speak up about the damage it does. It’s small wonder there’s such a horrendous suicide rate within my tribe.
So much of the harm caused to beautiful autistic minds comes from lazy, utilitarian, monolithic capitalist doctrine, where a person must be a conveniently fungible unit of labor. Einstein didn’t speak until he was four—what would have happened if he wasn’t allowed to dance in that wordless space as his mind developed? Would he be just another future suicide statistic living in a gray fog of drugged exhaustion, told he was broken and unworthy so much that anyone who mimed treating him with human dignity would get a gold star and a pat on the head from the system?
SCRY: It was life altering to interact with the Harvard Brain Bank – I felt hunted. Someone took the time to track me down and fill out the necessary paperwork to request the purchase of my brain post-mortem. Who was that person who typed up that letter. I’d like to go have lunch with them. Or something. Maybe not lunch. There was no evidence of empathetic humanity there, more like a big game trophy hunter longing to pose with the decapitated head of an endangered species.
DEPACKH: Echoes of that—I mentioned earlier about the zombie leader who hunts in my city—the backstory on how I knew this person is that I met them through my art and my work as a curator. I came across as fairly well-behaved in our early meetings, and they situated themselves to pursue a “friendship” or as much of a one as a high-level autism charity-machine official can have with a mere autistic. This person, as I said, had many connections at this lofty level throughout my city, several of whom were mutual acquaintances.
This group of professionals invited John Elder Robison to speak, and I was invited to sit in the audience as a suitably presentable domesticated autistic, in the interests of performing diversity and inclusion. Another member of the group of professionals had come to a somewhat clearer idea of what I was and noted that I’d put myself in the front row, in front of the neurosurgeons and therapists waiting to hear JER speak of how his tragically defective brain had been briefly raised to humanity by being riddled with random magnetic waves. I was ready to question him on the ethics of researchers who would bombard someone’s vital organ with unregulated but powerful forces that were known to cause significant, unplanned and unknown consequences to basic function. A statue was just removed from Central Park of someone who held similar attitudes about less-than-humans and the virtues of experimenting on them.
Anyway, by some mysterious oversight, JER was permitted to ramble on until the end of the allotted time, so there could be no Q&A period. The presence of a well-dressed autistic, clearly ready for debate, was enough for the event planners to decide all the neurosurgeons and therapists wouldn’t get their chance to interact with the “self-narrating zoo exhibit” (to use autistic activist Jim Sinclair’s term for what’s expected of tame autistics.) I’d already planned to meet the zombie leader for lunch to discuss the event in the following week, but somehow those plans never materialized…
SCRY: This all requires moles in the system, but once those of us who are high functioning are identified and our cover blown, all opportunities to speak are abruptly removed. Eventually – not too far into the future – neurodivergents will make up the majority of the US population, when we factor in neurological changes in an aging Baby Boomer population, and neuroqueer Millenials and younger.
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SCRY: Your project M/Other tongues surrounds a lot of underseen and crucial nodes – the one that first snagged me is the relationships between special schools for indigenous youth and for autistic youth. And part of that delta of snagged branches and rivulets – your point that the experience of school normalcy persecution segregation isolation campaigns places many of us in this delta. Whether we are placed in remedial schools for troubled youth, or schools for the children of swiss diplomats, or schools for neurodivergent, or schools to assimilate Native Americans…this is a process of sorting and separating that nonetheless places us in the same riverbed, with the same water source, but apart from each other. At the bottom of gullies and arroyos, canyons and valleys where we can hear each other calling out, sometimes, but aren’t brought together.
DEPACKH: I’ve approached this question from so many angles… my epiphany came at a bleak point in my life a couple of years after my autism diagnosis. I was dutifully going through therapy with a “recognized expert in the field” because I had burned out yet again. I was short of money, and one of the few things I had to sell was my diagnosis. I participated in a study hosted through two local universities which involved multiple approaches to autism diagnosis. I was being scanned in an MRI machine, and it dawned on me as I lay there motionless while my aberrances were being defined in 3-dimensional space that my brain was being mapped like a new frontier ripe for colonial exploitation. I’ve discussed in many places how my own background of privilege and experience of disability has given me insight into the workings of the machinery from both ends of the examining lens.
Of course, “divide and conquer” has been the doctrine and strategy of imperialism from the start. We can’t be permitted to speak to one another, because then we might become more a more powerful resistance. The recent political tides have made telling this story legibly all the more urgent. I’ve turned my attention almost completely toward fiction and illustration in the hope of being more accessible. I never thought I’d find myself described as a science fiction writer, but here I am beside Huxley and Orwell in the low-rent district of literature. If the partitions can be bridged by the lowest common denominator of popular communication, then that’s where I’ll start building.
SCRY: I was homeschooled until high school, and every time I ask my parents why I get a different response. My memory is going to kindergarden in rural Tennessee and being punished for bringing chicken bones soaked in vinegar as my show and tell. I was so excited to show everyone how they would bounce if you dropped them on the floor, but apparently it targeted me as a witch and a psychopath. I also remember falling for a boy named Bubba who was cognitively impaired and sobbing through class while he was bullied – not only was he “abnormal” at this school by nature of his brain, but also because his family was living in poverty and they used laundry detergent for bathing because their food stamps only bought one cleanser. Apparently, my friendship with him, and my crying when others bullied him, was enough to give me too many worrisome marks against me. Yet when I asked my mother this week why they sued the state of Tennessee to prevent me from going to school until high school, she said, “because i was holding you one day when you were six weeks old and you looked at me and it was clear you knew things that others didn’t, and I was worried about you being taught that was wrong.”
DEPACKH: How wonderful that you were perceived. I don’t see anything inconsistent in these answers—only that each is a different perspective on the same reality. I went through a similar experience of social indoctrination, but only found relief when I left home at fourteen and refused to return until I was pulled from the school system. It would have been too embarrassing to my mother to have me hunted down by a truant officer, so other arrangements were hastily and discreetly made.
SCRY: Othering is an act. It’s a concept, and it’s a strategy, and it’s a tactic, and an action. Othering is an entire ecological system, and I’m not sure we pull it apart into its component parts critically enough.
I find that by default most folks tend to turn othering into something binary, akin to good and evil. These are the Others, and these are Us. Or These are the Otherers, and We are the Othered. When in my experience, I’ve been othered by just about everyone. I’ve not felt welcomed in any community that, technically, I fit into. This is a constant harangue of mine, but if we look at the System of Othering without assigning the usual suspects, and we actually look inward at how our own community does it to each other, we might find clues that are helpful.
DEPACKH: I couldn’t agree more. I used as the banner for my activist page the image at the end of the second Invasion of the Body Snatchers of Donald Sutherland pointing into the camera—I don’t think many of my more Madam Defarge-inclined peers saw all the facets of what I was saying with that.
Autistics who can “pass” often live in fear of being outed, and those who have been outed then turn on their fellows by call-out for perceived infractions against the ever-shrinking community until a few are left in each impotent, isolated group, huddled with each other, rolling their eyes in paranoia and screeching at those enemies enough like themselves to be within their reach.
Thus, the mission of the imperialist is accomplished without him having done anything more than training them properly.
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SCRY: Although I only became digitally acquainted with you a few years ago, and I don’t recall how our social media paths crossed, I’ve delved a bit into your book THE NEW PANOPTICON and again I discover the eerie similarities in the work we have both undertaken – contemporary as well as historical.
My projects CHARITÉ, MOUNTAIN SWEEP, THE TINY URN, and about five other projects are ongoing pieces that center around experiments on neurodivergent children in Germany, Austria, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, and several other sites. I discovered a mass grave at a hospital in Virginia where my great-grandfather was experimented upon. The list goes on. I feel a tangible sense of other neuroqueers calling to me across time.
DEPACKH: Yet natural selection keeps creating us as the world destroys us. One of my more brilliant peers, a robotics/AI developer and my first “toaster oven” for converting an outcast nerd into a proud autistic, is of the opinion that autism and some other forms of neurodiversity are nature’s attempt to evolve a new form of loading intelligence into the finite form of the fetus, hence our out-of-synch neural development as compared to what are deemed normal benchmarks.
I don’t know if you’re referring to the Willard suitcase project in New York http://www.suitcaseexhibit.org/index.php?section=about&subsection=suitcases – it was one of the ah-hah moments I had when I was talking with my Seneca (Haudenosaunee) friend about it and the graveyard of children at the site of the old Carlisle Indian School, and how harrowingly resonant the harmonies those two sites sang to each other were, in the buried history of our culture. I do not think anything could be more terrifying to the social structure than to have those notes become pure enough to vibrate its posts and beams into instability.
SCRY: What is your writing trajectory at this point in spacetime?
DEPACKH: I’ve begun to write more fiction, both dystopian/speculative noir and weird/horror because it allows a deeper palette for depicting these structures. Get Out, Us, and Sorry to Bother You have gotten to places a straightforward journalistic analysis of the interlocking systems of exploitation and oppression can’t reach.
I hope someday to get back into the nonfiction projects, but right now I’m enjoying the freedom of throwing my subjects into a funhouse hall of mirrors. Perhaps I’ll do an autofiction in the style of House of Leaves, but, I hope, more readable.
SCRY: Readabilty is murky terrain. I’ve never found my books difficult, but they tend to be polarized by people who find them completely opaque, and those to whom they are clear blue skies. I love that we didn’t meet over our literary work, but that instead our neuroqueerness brought us into phasespace together, and we found commonalities across many membranes.
DEPACKH: I don’t have a clear memory of precisely how we initially intersected either, but I do know how deeply I was taken with your book A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be and the way I was struck by how much of that terrible resonance it contained. I know when I saw your name, I jumped at making the connection.
You delve into places I’ve allowed myself to be trained into leaving implicit. I’ve learned from mentors who have been brilliant in leading me to say my truth in a certain way, and the price I’ve paid for that facility is in the wells and the soarings of poetic language I’ve had to leave languish in the field. I’ve killed so many iridescent darlings in the service of expected narrative pace, it’s like having become accustomed to the routine murders of pests in the garden and thus lost the wonder in their lives I had as a child.
Your work called to me to remember a part of myself that still needs to steal the fruit.
SCRY: If there is a cosmic fruit tree, I think we both are bandits in the name of liberation.