Out of phase

I was born in the first half of the last century. I ploughed with horses and lived on a farm in Canada where the neighbours all got together to run a threshing machine each fall. Being big and stupid, I had the ass-end job of shovelling the resulting grain away from the auger in the depths of the soot-blackened grain bin. My grandmother was born before Daimler met Benz, and she could never figure out why I was building an airplane. Even after Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon.
I worked with the grandson of Cogwagee (Tom Longboat). Running in the same hills beside the Grand River as the world champion marathoner of one hundred years ago, I thought I knew what he was feeling as he effortlessly covered mile after mile of open countryside. When I finish my filmscript on Cogwagee, I may try to look up his family, again.
My father saw the dirigible L59 fly overhead, as he was on his way to serve in the border dispute between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Later, he owned a Bistro in Lyons, France. ("Bistro" means "hurry up! - work more efficiently!") I was born in England, and never saw, and never will see, Yugoslavia.
I have been from Paris to Kuala Lumpur showing corporations how to work more efficiently and profitably. That extra profit never seems to come into my pockets, though. Slav=slave. A happy, highly worthwhile, screw-him-when-you-can slave. Ah well.
I think it was John Ford who said that screenwriters are the most important people in the whole process of film making - but don't tell them that!
Some people get used. A few do the using. Most lay back and take another sip.
My mother knew the Teslas. Nikola Tesla's sister was her favourite. My mother could tie a knot in an eyelash - Tesla's mother could tie three knots in an eyelash. Of course, Nikola Tesla is the person who invented AC electricity and remote-controlled robots and 600 other patented things that we now use (and are still being "discovered"). He was the Wizard of Oz and Mark Twain's "Mysterious Stranger". So many of that community were exceptional in their capabilities. For those who showed some exceptional ability, there was an inexorably mated factor - they were, and are, perceived as being "out of phase" with others. This translates into a vague and completely unfounded distrust. The community has now been completely bulldozed and resettled by other people.
Aspergers syndrome is used to describe the out-of-phase characteristic. I think it's still voodoo science to place people inside such a fence.
The characteristics shown by people arise out of a flowing, multi-dimensional matrix. Hard-wired genetic factors set the stage. Environmental inputs then either harden further predispositions, or deal various degrees of glancing blows to established tendencies. Then language comes into play like a whirlwind on the Sahara, pushing this way and that; re-forming, covering, baring, choking, and bringing occasional rain.
A person’s “personality” is a snapshot at some point in that on-going process.
To artificially pull out a few characteristics at one point and label a person “bi-polar” or “autistic” or “attention-deficit” is to fall into the trap that language (that separate, sentient life form) has laid for us: Categorization.
Everything has to be Named. Otherwise, how does one refer to something unnamed? If it doesn’t have a noun, it is to be Feared (the default Name).
Imagine not “thinking” in Words. We call that dreaming.
Dreams may or may not be in colour – sometimes.
Dreams flow. And happen. And just “are”. To describe them is to throw them into the rock-solid confinement of not-dreams – Language.
Dreams may or may not follow “logic” (a reproducible series of [named] steps, one following the step of the previous one).
Dreams may be not applicable to conscious actions, or they may provide the “leap in logic” [leap over logic] that would not have been possible by following the currently known series of plodding steps in a process.
Tesla dreamed. In his dreams he SAW AC dynamos at work, powering AC multiphase motors.
But he was out of phase. The original “Mad Scientist” with soirees attended by Mark Twain and JP Morgan and other lucky folk who sat in his residence in the Waldorf Astoria with Tesla coils sparking and motors whirring and Tesla holding one of his fluorescent tubes in his hands, all lit up and not connected to anything. Great matters were discussed at these soirees. But like a dream (although all these things happened) there was little or no translation into the life of real Words. So the soirees, like dreams, evaporated out of the historical stream of events. As did Tesla.
As may I.

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