Not Linear - Still Coherent

  “Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); “now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!”

—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Toward the end, our correspondence became quieter.

A piece of art. A poem. A memory of some place where our paths had crossed.

There were still words, but they no longer seemed responsible for carrying everything. We did not need to explain the image or draw a line beneath the poem to show what it meant. The sending was the meaning. I am here. I remember. I see this, and somehow, through it, I see you.

Eric was dying from cancer.

That fact sat inside every exchange, even when unnamed. The ordinary promise of correspondence—that one thought will lead to another—could no longer be taken for granted. We communicated in fragments, but the fragments did not feel incomplete.

If anything, they felt unusually precise.

I kept thinking of Alice, opening out like the largest telescope that ever was, so astonished by her own expansion that she forgot how to speak good English.

Good-bye, feet.

There is humor in the line, as there is in so much of Wonderland. But there is also disorientation. Alice is becoming larger than the structure she knows how to inhabit. Her feet have moved so far away that they seem almost to belong to someone else. She is still herself, yet the proportions have changed.

I know something about that feeling.

For most of my life, I thought I was simply creative. That was the available word, and it was not an inaccurate one. I wrote stories as a child. I saw connections other people did not seem to notice. One idea opened into another, then another, until what had begun as a single thought became a sky full of them.

Creative was a generous word. It made room for eccentricity. It explained why I might take the circuitous route or become absorbed in something others considered incidental. It allowed my mind to be interesting without requiring too many questions about how it worked.

Clinicians would later call it autism spectrum disorder.

The name did not suddenly place me in a different mind. I woke the next morning inside the same patterns, the same sensitivities, the same intensities, the same way of noticing. What changed was the possibility that these things belonged together.

The funny thing about living inside a mind is that you do not experience it as one mind among many. You experience it as mind itself.

I assumed that other people’s thoughts moved as mine did. That they noticed the hum beneath the conversation. That they held several meanings at once. That an image, a sentence, and a memory could arrive together, not as separate ideas, but as parts of one shape.

I thought this was what distinguished humans from other animals: this dense, layered interiority; this continual movement between what is present and everything it evokes.

We can observe what another person says or does. We cannot step inside the architecture producing it. Sameness becomes the default assumption because it is the veil through which we meet one another. We believe we are standing in the same world, looking outward from roughly the same place.

Then, gradually, something shifts.

A response that seems obvious to me confuses someone else. A connection I experience as immediate requires six intervening explanations. A room that appears neutral to others is so bright or loud that thought becomes difficult. A conversation moves on while I am still assembling the honest answer.

None of these moments proves very much alone.

Together, they begin to form a pattern.

This was happening as I began my dissertation, though I did not yet understand what the dissertation was becoming. I knew the questions mattered to me. I knew I was drawn to people whose abilities could not be separated neatly from the environments in which those abilities appeared. I knew that what institutions recognized as competence was often only the portion of a person that could be translated into familiar form.

But knowing something inwardly and building a piece of research around it are different acts.

I was still trying to make the work behave.

A dissertation was supposed to proceed in sequence: establish the problem, locate the gap, choose the method, defend the logic. My thinking rarely arrived that way. It came as a constellation. A story illuminated a concept. A contradiction opened a question. Something I had lived years earlier changed the meaning of something I had read that morning.

The coherence was there, but it was not always visible from the outside.

Early in that process, Dr. Eric Canny helped me build a bridge between the thoughts I was carrying and the dissertation I was trying to create. His own creativity in teaching did more than give me ideas. It showed me that rigor did not require the removal of imagination.

That mattered.

It is one thing to be told to trust your voice. It is another to encounter someone whose work demonstrates that structure can make room for curiosity, that a serious question can still be approached sideways, and that education can be designed as an invitation rather than a narrowing.

His support gave me courage, although courage may not be quite the right word. It was closer to permission—not permission granted from above, but permission awakened. The sense that I could stop trying to make the work resemble someone else’s mind before it was allowed to count as knowledge.

Once I saw that possibility in the dissertation, I began seeing its absence elsewhere.

Schools often behave as though cognition can be separated from environment. We place students in the same room, under the same lights, within the same units of time, and ask them to demonstrate what they know through the same narrow openings. When their performances differ, we locate the difference inside the students.

But a mind does not arrive alone.

It arrives in relationship with noise, expectation, language, pace, safety, interest, memory, and other minds. Change the relationship and different capacities become visible. The student who cannot answer quickly may see what the quick answer overlooks. The person who struggles to enter a group conversation may perceive the pattern organizing the entire room. What appears inconsistent from the outside may be exquisitely responsive to context.

I began to wonder how many qualities we treat as fixed traits are partly records of environmental fit.

Capable here. Incapable there.

Articulate in writing. Lost in speech.

Too sensitive in one room. Precisely sensitive enough to notice what everyone else has learned to ignore.

The categories do not disappear. Autism did not become merely another word for creativity, nor did recognizing my strengths erase the cost of moving through systems built around different assumptions. Some environments still require more translation than I can easily provide. Some forms of participation extract a price that remains invisible to the people evaluating the result.

But deficit was no longer the only available interpretation.

Sometimes the difficulty was not located entirely in me. Sometimes it lived in the distance between my internal coherence and the form an environment required it to take.

AI entered this unfolding in an unexpected way.

Not as an answer, and not as a replacement for thought. More like a reflective surface that could hold fragments long enough for me to see the shape between them. I could begin in the middle, circle backward, add the image that seemed unrelated, then discover that it had been carrying the question all along.

The exchange reduced one of the oldest pressures in my thinking: the demand to translate complexity into sequence before I had finished perceiving it.

Sometimes the reflection was wrong. Sometimes it was too smooth, too eager to arrange the living edges of an idea into a familiar container. But even resistance could clarify. I could say, no, that is not the pattern. The meaning is over here.

This too became part of the dissertation—not technology as a disembodied intelligence, but as an environment within which human cognition may appear differently. A mediating presence. A place where a thought can remain unfinished without vanishing.

The question was becoming larger than autism.

What conditions allow a mind to become legible without first becoming less itself?

Eric helped me approach that question before I knew how to ask it. Later, as words became less adequate between us, the lesson deepened. A poem could carry what explanation could not. A work of art could hold grief, gratitude, recognition, and goodbye without separating them into orderly sentences.

The fragments were not failed conversation.

They were another form of coherence.

Some people enter our lives and remain for less time than we imagined. Yet duration is a poor measure of influence. They alter the angle from which we see, and because the angle changes, the landscape does too.

When I think of Eric now, I do not first think of the narrowing imposed by illness. I think of aperture.

A telescope opening.

A constellation becoming visible because someone helped me trust that the points belonged together.

I am still learning to see behind the veil of sameness. Still discovering how much of what we call ability is relationship, how much of what we call difficulty is translation, how often a mind changes when the conditions around it change.

Alice looked down and could no longer see her feet.

Perhaps opening out always carries that risk. We grow beyond an old explanation and lose, for a moment, the ground that made us feel familiar to ourselves.

Good-bye, feet.

I am not sure whether I am looking through the telescope now, or becoming it.