Once, I wrote an entire essay based off a word in a quote that didn’t actually exist. The quote I was using to make my claims was, in part, fabricated. It was as if my brain had imagined the word to be there because it made sense. I can’t now remember what the word was and why it fitted into place so neatly. But I do remember the dismay of realising that my argument was based off something I had dreamt up.
Recently, Facebook advertised to me a short clip of Jay Blades talking about ‘Learning to Read at 51’. The clip started with him saying “The words move like that *his hand wiggles in the air* my brain tends to, kind of, make words up because I’m trying to catch them”. I heard this and I took a sharp breath. I am also dyslexic, and although I have never had the experience of swimming words, I do often feel as if the words are more watery that those who see lines straightforwardly for what they are. It seems the words’ meanings are liquid to me too. Splashing up for second, in the shape I hoped to see, freezing there, then melting again when I realised I’d seen things ‘wrong.’
But maybe I shouldn’t dismay about basing an argument off a dream, a mistake, a hallucination. The thing about my ‘wrong’ misreading was that it was actually a *new* reading, it let me see things about the book I was writing about that I otherwise never would have arrived at. It gave me a new path through the text. It kept me on the look out for different things in the rest of the text that I wouldn’t have seen previously, and those things were actually there. In a world that prioritises being ‘right’ over being curious, neuro-diverse people are punished for this sort of thing all the time.
What if we leant into exploring why we hope to see something that ‘isn’t there’? What if we tried to notice *why* we had hoped to see something? What if what you see out of the corner of your eye teaches you as much as what is right in front of you?
This doesn’t just apply to (mis)reading a text. It applies to all of us who know things to be true for us, and want to look at things differently than the status quo. Those of us who are demanded to ‘evidence’ our lives and existences, in a way that those with more power never are. Where if what we see is not shared it is not believed.What if we saw our own confirmation bias, and to some extent, consciously embraced it?
I learnt in class about ‘kinky empiricism’ a methodology of understanding the world of experiences which is ‘always slightly off kilter, always aware of the slipperiness of its grounds and the difficulty of adequately responding to the ethical demands spawned by its methods. Being off-kilter is a strength, not a weakness. For anthropology, it is what coming with getting real.’ (Rutherford 2012, p.466)
So maybe the twists and turns of seeing things from odd angles is a way of getting real about the world.
In the park local to me, there are many ‘desire lines’ - paths that weren’t originally designed to be there. But instead have been craved out by many people choosing to take a different route. Often they cut a corner so the desire line looks like the horizonal line in an ‘A’. There have been points in my life when I’ve seen the desire line, the path I actually wanted to take, but I have still taken the long way around. Sometimes this is something I needed to stay safe. Sometimes because it has felt neater, cleaner, less murky. There are other points where I trip over on route to my own desire lines. I may know what I want and the way to get there, but I trip over the audacity of following my desire line.
But often, I take the desire lines. Perhaps the imagined words and my imagined worlds I hope to see are my desire lines. Carving out ‘A’s where there were actually ‘V’s. The different shape pointing me in a different direction, towards something worth turning towards, to be dazzled by.
Tell me what you are turning towards. x