Craig Smith

Three of us travelled from Adelaide to Port Augusta to facilitate a workshop for teachers on supporting neurodiverse learning needs in the classroom.

The workshop was almost called off due to extreme high temperatures in the region. It was my first time travelling through this part of the country.

I was taken by the salt lakes, pink and bouncy underfoot like a moon made from buttock, the wind farms that knit the clouds together through wind tapestry, and the way the Spencer Gulf runs up the peninsula as an ever-present line of blue on the west that does not transition into pastoralism via shore and gradient flax to aureolin and straw but rather simply cuts from water to infinite arid expanse like two pieces of unrelated film seamed together at an arbitrary junction.

A central motif of Gerald Murnane's 'The Plains' (this rhyme does not appear to me a chance occurrence) is of a horizon never reached. Not quite Beckett's joke about the life to come ('Mine was always that') but similar, less about the future than the past, about being born with a particular subjectivity that is aware of its limits.

At the end of the first day of our workshop, after dinner, I dropped my colleagues off at our accommodation near the main bridge across Port Augusta's harbour and I went off into the evening heat to take a look around.

There have been numerous attempts over the past two decades to articulate a new category of diagnosis that may sit alongside certain tenets associated with autism and ADHD that has been referred to as 'intense emotional sensitivity', also 'highly sensitive person' and, already in the diagnostic and statistical manual, 'hyper-empathy syndrome'.

I spotted a water tower lookout that I drove to and climbed up to take in a panorama of the region. Everywhere was monochromatic, either dusted in black shadow or fired in orange embers, from the water to the flats to the township and the mountains against the skyline that would, shortly, collapse its light and leave only void. I took that view back to my room for the night, a neat bedsit walled with corrugated iron, and considered a fantasy.

The fantasy begins like this - a witch and a hacker live together in a small regional setting. Say they are life partners, they are lovers and colleagues, working together in order to do what, to perform miracles of nature.

One of the core literary lessons I have taken from Murnane is in consideration to what is left in your mind after you put a book down in the minutes, months and decades that follow. What remains other than, at best, a few strong images.

With the diagnostic opportunity to classify emotional sensitivity, we are presented with a strong opportunity to create a punchline about yet another facet of being human (all too human) that can been pathologised.

I'm on the affirmative for its consideration.

Thank the Romantic period, perhaps. Like the aesthetic framing of beauty in certain prescribed natural spaces, so too the idea of the easily wounded individual, the fragile soul, someone for whom life is too painful and overwhelming and so they turn to a quiet life of rural walks, poetry and abundant yearning.

The witch and the hacker could be set in one of Gerald Murnane's eastern-European folk story fascinations, a Hungarian village with a deep well, a place he has never seen in real life due, perhaps, to his unwillingness to use air travel.

Looking out through the gauze door on my accommodation, towards the harbor, remembering the panorama, I remembered too that I saw a tunnel of smoke billowing.

Twenty years after reading Ulysses I see a stone tower by the ocean, a carriage following a hearse, and a faceless huddle of drunk doctors. The same period on from Gravity's Rainbow, I see a vapour trail from a balcony covered in bananas and a mechanical octopus on the beach near a casino.

I have never been in a war zone, but it was all too easy to associate a collage of how many hundreds of recent amateur video recordings of smoke rising from rocket-fall in the Ukraine with the rising plumbs I saw fusing with the Flinder's Ranges as I thought about the witch and the hacker.

He hacks into the phloem of trees, the inner bark pipeline of data that he translates into a public vocabulary that the witch then metabolises in her brew.

The second day of our workshop goes well and we get on the road at a decent time afterwards.

I say that Murnane has never seen Hungary in real life, but he would likely take issue with this and conjure his seemingly Heideggerian-inspired compound terms.

After two days of talking about school my colleauges and I talk, on the drive home, about our own kids and the various challenges they have faced across the years, particularly when confronted with compliance requirements.

Say the hacker is approached by an astronaut who met an angel in the uppermost layer of our atmosphere.

For Murnane, the image-landscape of Hungary and the image-woman who walks up to the image-well for water are just as real after reading them in a book and casting them to memory as walking down the street and processing the image-landscape of rural Victoria and the image-newsagents and the image-hotel.

But what about tens of thousands of lines of dialogue, of plot trajectories and character development. Enjoyed at the time of eyes on the page, soon to dissolve into so much forgotten minutia in the period beyond the book.

What if the astronaut and the angel need help conceiving. While the hacker and the astronaut look towards the smoke on the horizon, beyond the wheat fields, imagine a conversation between the witch and the angel, about what the angel can see from up there, in the exosphere.

You must attend this many days a week, you must complete the assessment task in this manner, you must be present in the assembly hall for the duration of the period.

The three of us conceded, on the road beyond Port Germein, that as students we were all remarkably non-compliant in the face of mainstream edusocial mores, hence our current employability in teaching educators how to, essentially, reject human standardisation.

To my eyes, the main diagnostic feature of emotional sensitivity in the many hundreds of students and adults I have lived with over the years, present company included, is that they feel things too much.

From an interview with Gerald Murnane, question: there are people now who write about such feelings of being a little bit separate from the world and making lists and making lots of categories and would say that that's a slightly autistic way to be in the world.

The title of an article about Murnane, 'An Idiot in the Greek Sense'. Another, 'A puzzle: an author completely in control, and yet utterly uncontrolled'.

The hacker has an idea involving egg incubation via a tree that is launched like a rocket into low orbit, but what about the pending war on the horizon, the smoke leviathan threading its way from the border.

Imagine a conversation between the witch and the angel about what the angel can see from up there and how she tells the witch that on high the world does not appear as a vessel worth preserving, too non-descript and ahistorical, but down here, in the dirt, she wants a baby and she wants it to thrive.

The jetty at Port Germein, which we turned our car around on the highway to visit after reading a sign advertising it as the longest in the southern hemisphere, stretches beyond view. From memory it is over one-and-a-half kilometres long due to how perpetually low the tide is. I watched an image-woman and her two image-dogs run across the limitless image-seaweed bed.

Emotions are too big. When someone else feels a negative emotion, like embarrassment or shame or fear, the emotionally sensitive person will empathise too much and bring it doubly upon themselves.

While they feel too much they nonetheless crave emotional experiences, although they learn very early on that some emotions can travel down a pathway directly, in abundance, into the nerves of not just the figurative heart, but the whole literal body, causing painful overload.

And so, they filter and restrict the incoming social data (and sensory data, Cartesian dualisms be damned) to reduce the potential of being hurt.

Murnane's response to the interview question: I may be that way. You asked me a question like this once before, and the moment it came out of your mouth I bristled, I thought 'I'm getting out of here', but you asked it in a much more friendly way today.

The hacker wonders if they should fight the approaching war machine by creating weapons. It would only take some minor adjustments to the egg incubating tree, by way of creating a tree-shaped mechanical fish that inverted the conception properties of the original design, with sea-launch intracontinental ballistic capabilities.

Driving back to Adelaide feels much quicker than the trip to Port Augusta. We arrive just before sundown.

Social vocabulary becomes limited because the filter is always up. The highly sensitive person wears an opaque lens that clouds the abundance of possible emotional dangers. And, with this limiting, comes a solitary exploration of interiority.

These explorations may arrive as carefully coordinated social fantasies with players on a stage, but more often than not they manifest as a collapsed, filtered set of core images that provide an education, through memory, on the many social and sensory lessons observed, but not experienced, during youth.

What if the angel and the astronaut have a baby, nursed into life by the witch. The hacker travels to a mermaid he and the witch know, she lives on the coast. She helps launch a prototype mechanical fish rocket out of the water and its potential for wartime success is immediately apparent. The hacker goes on to dream up more weapons.

In Murnane's writings, from his first published work all the way through to his last, the same set of visual motifs from childhood that play out against, not with, the image-life of his adult existence: horse racing (recurrence), fantasies of foreignness (life as others must experience it, past the horizon of the plains) and all manner of light passing through coloured glass, whether through marbles or church windows or wherever else sunlight can be filtered through an opaque lens, the core analogy of his consciousness.

I drop my colleagues at their hotel and I find mine some half dozen blocks towards the Botanic Gardens where I see twenty-metre high neon signs advertising a, quote, garden of unearthly delights, part of what I learn is the Adelaide fringe festival. The night air is all heat, less so than the regional interior a half-day earlier, but still at the upper-reach of balmy.

There is a magic show that begins in twenty minutes for which I buy a ticket. While waiting I wander between fairy lights, carnival rides, stand-up comedians, a young woman passed out beside a circus tent and an identical-looking woman walking away on stilts.

For dinner I buy a bao and a warm cinnamon doughnut.

The term autism is derived from the greek 'autos', meaning 'self'. Locked into the self, unaware of others outside the self, unable to empathise with others outside the self, nothing but rigid, unfeeling, clinical self.

What we have learned, by listening to autistic individuals, is how much some are connected, always, to others, and rather than lacking empathy they rather experience too much of it, over-thinking what others might be thinking and feeling, in debilitating abundance. And so, they filter.

In Murnane's self-purported last book in which he reviews all the works he has published across his life, he ends with a lyric he has written, in Hungarian, for some music he has composed.

The witch and the hacker talk about the angel, the astronaut, their newborn baby and the military aggressors, a conflagration of armaments, marching onwards.

Similar to how the diagnosis of Asperger's became absorbed by the broad categorical reach of the autism spectrum so too, in some domains, are the boundaries of autism dissolving beside the presence of neurodiversity.

I've had the pleasure of sitting down with Judy Singer, the Australian sociologist responsible for coining the term, for an afternoon in her living room, talking about how the idea of neurodiversity is just not an attempt at signaling how we all have uniquely different minds, but how valuable this is to society, akin the ecological benefits of biodiversity.

The magic show involves acrobatic displays involving a Hungarian gymnast who rolls on top of a large inflated white balloon. She then opens the balloon and sticks her arm in, plugging the deflation, and gradually fits her other arm, head, torso and, with her legs, her whole body inside. She rolls around the stage and when the balloon pops it becomes apparent that she has disappeared completely.

Moving on then from diagnostic categories, of this being autism and this being ADHD and this being sensory-processing disorder and this being hyper-empathy syndrome and so on, what interests me most in an age of neurodiversity (see: the Romantic period) are the profound interiorities we gain access too through the uniquely channelled, filtered sensitivities of individuals who find sustained methods for giving light to their reflections.

Would it be an ironic historical twist if the highest quality and most sensitive depictions of human subjectivity were those derived from a subset of the population slandered as lacking emotions and a capacity for empathy, or would it be a long-game justification of the word 'autos' / 'self'.

The last lyric, translated into English, that Murnane puts to music, is 'Help me, dear one, to ensure patiently my going back to my own sort of heaven'.

And I imagine the hacker telling the astronaut, before sending a message through to the mermaid to commence the rocket sequence, to put their baby to sleep in his space suit tonight, for warmth.

The walk back to the hotel does not take long, and it is only a short time after this that everything turns white.