It’s Tuesday morning now‒which, fortunately, as far as I know, has never been described as “never-ending”. Alas, the same cannot be said of Tuesday afternoon. However, since we are not still stuck in the last Tuesday afternoon‒or indeed in the very first Tuesday afternoon‒then we have to conclude that the line “Tuesday afternoon is never-ending” from the Beatles song Lady Madonna is a poetic figure of speech.
That’s weirdly frustrating for me. It reminds me a bit of how I remember reading that Tolkien was frustrated with the play Macbeth because Birnam Wood didn’t actually come to Dunsinane, signaling Macbeth’s imminent defeat*. Tolkien didn’t see why, in a play that clearly involved the supernatural, the wood could not literally come to Dunsinane.
Of course, in the fullness of time, in his own work, the Forest of Fangorn really did come to Isengard, and to Helm’s Deep. It’s one of the best moments in The Lord of the Rings.
How did I get onto that subject? Or, as Théoden asked, “How did it come to this?”
Now I’m suddenly thinking about the moment when Théoden, despairing, asks (in the movie) “What can men do against such reckless hate?” It’s a real moment of doubt and pain, but Aragorn is there to support his spirit.
And that makes me think of doing a “parody” version of Sympathy for the Devil, in which we would have the line, “I was ‘round when Théoden had his moment of doubt and pain / Made damn sure that the uruk hai met our swords and sealed their fate.” It could be called, perhaps, Sympathy for the Ranger or Sympathy for the Strider or something like that.
We could have lines like “Just as every Noldor is a kinslayer, and all the Nazgul slaves / as East is West just call me…Aragorn, ‘cause Minas Tirith I will save,” or something along those lines. It’s a bit silly and cheesy, I guess, but that’s okay; it’s a parody. Anyway, I don’t think I’m actually going to try to produce a whole set of lyrics for it, but who knows? I’ve done weirder things for more frivolous reasons.
As for what to do about relatively more serious things‒i.e., my diagnosis of ASD level2‒I still don’t know. I don’t know how I’m going to go about following the recommendations in the report, such as they are. Knowing at least some of the explanations for many of the difficulties I’ve had in my life, including my relatively intractable troubles with depression and with insomnia and social anxiety, is a good thing in and of itself, but it doesn’t necessarily give me any idea how to approach things from here.
In some sense, it is a little discouraging, especially regarding my depression and insomnia, since there is no cure for neurodevelopmental disorders; they are a product of the fundamental structure and function of the brain. At best, they can be managed. This also explains why many traditional or typical treatments for such things do not work well in those with ASD; evidently, for instance, cognitive behavioral therapy doesn’t tend to work as well for people with autism as it does for “neurotypical” people. And I know that antidepressants have more limited efficacy as well.
This makes sense. We commonly hear of how many of the treatments and scientific understanding of major illness were for a long time only studied in men, and women were treated the same way as males, until slowly, gradually, the medical community realized that many diseases present differently in women, and respond differently to treatment.
Well, autistic and other “neurodivergent” people are a much smaller portion of the population than women are, and we don’t know as much as we would like about psychiatric and related disorders and their treatment even in the neurotypical. It makes sense that we should be somewhat behind the curve in even understanding, let alone knowing how to treat, psychological and neurological disorders in those with underlying neurodevelopmental conditions.
The universe is complicated. Any attempt to make it seem or feel less so, as by following the “ideas” of demagogues and demonizing those who might disagree, is just going to leave one vulnerable to underlying, actual reality‒which is not merely a matter of perception.
The universe at large does not care what you believe. You can definitely be killed by forces and things that you not only don’t understand, but in which you don’t believe, or about which you have not the slightest inkling. As a particularly gruesome example, it didn’t matter whether JFK ever knew he was being shot at, let alone that he had been hit. A person can die before they even know that anything is happening; they can be just snuffed out and gone. Probably most people, and nearly all other animals, die not understanding at all what is killing them or how or why or what death is.
Such is the evenhanded dealing of the world, to paraphrase Ebenezer Scrooge. The only thing we can do to armor ourselves is to try to understand as much about the universe as we can. For one never knows what knowledge will be useful or even essential before one has that knowledge. Greater knowledge is always worthwhile, all other things being equal.
Of course, all other things never really are equal, but that’s why it pays to learn how to solve partial differential equations.
That’s enough for now. Have a good day if you can, please.
*Macbeth’s reaction when he receives the news that, apparently, Birnam Wood really has come to Dunsinane Hill, is to hit the messenger and yell “Liar and slave!” I know I’m not the only one who thinks it’s kind of funny and also is an instance of one of the cardinal failures of literary and dramatic (and real life) villains: they discourage their own people from giving them information by punishing them for delivering accurate but bad news.
Robert Elessar 