Neuro-divergence is not a super power: Almond by Son Won Pyeong

A week ago, I finally finished the novel Almond that took me about two months to read. I kept getting sidetracked, and then it was difficult for me to get going again, both just from a "what the hell was going on, again?" standpoint as well as an "I should really read instead of waste time on the Internet" perspective. But I got through it.

There is no English translation of this book, so for most of you, the write-up I'm about to do is the only contact with this book you'll ever get. Bridging the cross-cultural divide: just one more free benefit the world gets out of Workshop Heretic.

Almond is about a teenager named Yun Jae who has alexithymia. When I looked up what alexythmia was, I wasn't sure how it was different from Asperger's, which I've heard of before because of friends' kids. Essentially, it's a condition in which someone can neither experience emotions the way most humans do or recognize emotional reactions in others. It shares some outward traits with both autism and Asperger's.

The title has a two-fold origin: First, the novel tells us that the origins of alexithymia are in an underdevelopment of the amygdala, the almond-like structure in the brain. (If you look around on the Internet a bit, you won't actually find this to be a prevalent explanation of the origins of the condition. For the sake of enjoying the novel, I found it was best to just accept the in-book explanations of things, at least as far as analyzing the story itself goes.)  The second reason why the novel is called "Almond" is because the boy's mother, hoping to somehow get his brain to develop so he could be "normal," force-fed him scores of almonds, believing nuts were a good brain food.

The book rather reminded me of Mark Haddon's 2003 novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, a story about a 15-year-old boy with autism or something like it. Both are told by a point-of-view narrator who's got his work cut out for him if he's going to be able to communicate with would-be readers. In Haddon's novel, we are told that the narrator got help from one of his counselors to write the book, which allows us to deal with suspension-of-disbelief issues. In Son's novel, although Yun Jae himself would not have been able to write with such well-tuned emotional pitch, we somewhat accept it because Yun Jae grew up with a mother who ran a used book store. So Yun Jae has read thousands of examples of stories, although he doesn't really understand the emotions the characters are experiencing in them.

The first quarter of the novel is dedicated to Yun Jae's formative years. He lived with his mother, but not his father, because his father died in a freak accident before Yun Jae was born. After a few years of trying to raise Yun Jae, her mother realized it was beyond her, so she made up with the mother she'd stopped talking to over a fight about the boy's father. Yun Jae grows up with both his mother and grandmother. He seems to have an easier time understanding his grandmother, a straight-talking, soju-drinking woman who calls her grandson a "beautiful monster."

While I'm on the subject of autism spectrum and Korean stories, I have to take the time to HIGHLY recommend the 2005 Korean movie "Marathon," about an autistic young man who trains to run a marathon. 

Yun Jae's mother tries to brute force her son's way to her vision of normalcy. She explains the outer phenomena of emotions to him, hoping he can at least learn to recognize the signs of anger or sadness, even if he can't feel them himself. She hangs posters of the Chinese words for emotions like love or sadness around the house, hoping something will sink in by osmosis.

The novel's big turning point is when both the mother and grandmother are attacked by a homicidal lunatic at the end of his rope. The grandmother dies, and the mother becomes a vegetable. Yun Jae watches the entire attack. Soon after, he meets a new group of people he was never able to come in contact when his mother protected him, and his growth begins.

The new character with the most impact is Goni, the class bully. Goni was abducted at four years of age from his real parents, lived a terrible childhood, and then was reunited with his parents as a teenager just as his mother, worn away by grief from losing track of her son at the park, died of cancer. Goni has issues.

Being a bully, Goni immediately targets Yun Jae for torment. But Yun Jae, although he does get physically mauled by Goni, never shows fear. This fascinates Goni, who eventually befriends Yun Jae. Part of what Goni is attracted to is Yun Jae's inability to feel sadness or fear, which Goni equates with strength. Goni has been hurt, and he wants to not be hurt anymore.

Ultimately, Yun Jae, through his various friendships, does learn to feel on his own, at least in some sense. It's kind of a Pinocchio story, with Yun Jae noting that his story really ended at the point when he began to feel, because he had been replaced by a new peson.

Neuro-divergence in the world at present

There's been a movement in the last decade or so I have to confess I'm a little mystified by. It's a movement against "ableism." Some of its aims I find understandable and easy to get behind: greater access to society for those considered "disabled" in some sense. It doesn't matter if we're talking blindness, deafness, cognitive issues, or whatever. And that's great.

But along with this has come the rise of a "you must not even think of these conditions as disabilities" mindset. I get that in a certain sense: one doesn't want to concede to limitations. But it's also a little absurd to not only state that a person without the ability to hear is no worse off than one who can, but then to also police the language of anyone who doesn't agree.

Then, there's an even more extreme version: not only are disabilities not really disabilities, they're actually extra abilities. Recently, someone at my office just came back from a forum on autism saying this very thing. He really believed that in the future, autistic people would come to be very powerful, because of their superior way of viewing the world and processing information.

In the history of human evolution, there certainly have been moments where traits that were a disadvantage one moment became useful the next. So-called "deleterious genes" usually are weeded out of a population, but once in a while, they stick around, and then suddenly, those who carry them end up with an unexpected advantage when the environment changes. I'm totally willing to accept this could be the case with any type of neuro-diversity. But that's not the same as insisting that these conditions are not any kind of disadvantage in the current environment, including the sociological environment.

The novel Almond neither fetishizes Yun Jae's condition nor belittles it, which strikes me as the right position to take. The reader certainly is invited to try to understand how Yun Jae thinks--at times, the description is almost too clear, and we have to simply accept it or the whole novel will disintegrate in disbelief issues. It's easy in some points of the novel to see advantages to Yun Jae's way of processing information. For example, even while getting bullied mercilessly, he eats and sleeps as he always does and doesn't fret about something that is about to happen. It's impossible to make him suffer after the immediate physical stimulus is gone, which, as well all know, is the real hell of suffering.

At the same time, it's clear that the lack of emotion is a loss. Goni tortures a butterfly in front of Yun Jae, and Yun Jae does not understand why Goni is so upset that Yun Jae will not stop him from doing it. Yun Jae cannot comprehend why he should desire for the suffering of something that is not him to end. He does not understand empathy, and this does seem like a profound gap, however much emotional strength he might gain from not being able to worry about the things that drive most humans crazy.

The best part of the book is the dual empathy-learning that takes place. Yun Jae learns what empathy means in some sense while we, the readers, are learning to try to empathize with him. His quest to learn what it means to feel forces us to ask ourselves what feelings mean. In this sense, Yun Jae performs the same useful social role that any kind of "other" plays: His difference forces the rest of us to examine things we have always assumed could not be any other way.

Ultimately, for any outsider, the best society can try to offer is a tenuous balance between remaining different with the admiration of society and blending in. This novel offered a better statement of how that might actually work than many non-fictional statements I've seen. I'm hopeful that the level of credulity I had to give the story to make it work for me doesn't mean that such a balance is impossible in the real world.

Jon Snow, Aragorn, and the myth of the ruler who doesn't want to rule

Vanity Fair ran a piece last week wondering whether Jon Snow would, like Frodo in Lord of the Rings, end the series not as a king, but by leaving for the Gray Havens--the closest thing to that in the violent world of Game of Thrones being the North. Last night's episode where Daenerys goes full dragon-PMS blew that theory up--it's hard to imagine Jon going off to live a life of luxury knowing his family would be subject to a ruler who is now revealed to be a tyrant. But last night does revive the possibility that Jon may end up as king.

That same Vanity Fair article touched upon an idea that's been popular in America since George Washington: the best rulers are the ones who don't want to rule. For many, this brings to mind Aragorn from Tolkien's legendarium, a legendarium Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin has admitted his series is in dialogue with.

Aragorn didn't want to be king, so he was the perfect king, the thinking goes, and now that Daenerys is definitely not the right person for the job, reluctant ruler Jon Snow will be the man for the job.

But is this really a good criterion for a ruler? Doesn't being a ruler require someone who has prepared an entire life specifically for that role?

The idea that Aragorn didn't want to be king is entirely from the movies. Tolkien's Aragorn very much wanted to be king. Elrond, the father of his true love Arwen, would only give his daughter to Aragorn if he first became the king of a united Gondor and Arnor. Aragorn actually spent decades preparing for the test. (True, he trained to win the throne by wandering and being a badass, not to be a good ruler by reading a lot, but it still shows he wanted to be king.)

If there is anything the show has taught us, it's that ruling is always a terribly deft art of threading an impossibly thin needle. There are dangers of being too soft and being too hard. There is danger in too much ambition and too little. You can show too much strength or too little. Someone like Daenerys who has been taught to believe in her destiny to rule might end up going too far in one direction, but a Stark who is always naively good might just as well go too far in the other. The only person right now on Game of Thrones who might be fit to rule is Sansa. Or Tyrion, if he could stop making one wrong decision after another.

A lot of people don't have the ambition to rule. That doesn't mean they should rule. 

I see three possibilities for the last episode next week:

-Daenerys is evil, and she is killed/ousted in favor of someone else, like Jon, Sansa, Tyrion, etc. (A cool scene could take place in which she tries to dragon blast Jon for not bending the knee to her after her nuking the city, and the dragon either won't do it or it doesn't hurt him because he's a Targaryen.)

-Daenerys is evil, but the show ends without a coup being fully carried out. Instead, we're right back where we started with a mad Targaryen and the need to find a king slayer. You can't break the wheel, because in trying to break it, you only make it go round. The entire show was about the futility of trying to escape the game. The game is inevitable.

-Daenerys is, against all reason, right. She had to do what she did. After listening to her advisers tell her over and over to go lightly, she finally had to get raw with her enemies. It's a dark and Machiavellian ending, one in which the worst thing power can do is to be half-hearted. She gets to work and does a good job ruling, after first overpowering everyone who opposes her. (Personally, I don't see this as possible. I think the graphic images of innocent people dying are clear indication she's gone too far to save. But it wouldn't be totally out of line for a show that's been pretty close to an endorsement of realpolitik throughout.)

Whatever happens, I hope we don't think that Jon can save us because of his pure heart that doesn't really want to rule unless we all ask him really nice so he just has to. 

Given that The Avengers is about American Militarism, what is the finale trying to say?

Whether it's to say that superhero movies of the 21st century have tended to support American adventurism and imperialism or to suggest that some of the 22 Marvel movies since 2008's Iron Man have subtly questioned American militarism even while supporting an essential conservatism, a lot of critics of the series have noted the rather obvious links between the Avengers as a team of superheroes and American military power. I tend to think Nick Schaeger got it right four years ago when he showed how deftly the franchise managed to use tension between right-leaning and left-leaning superheroes in order to get both liberals and conservatives to pay for movie tickets. Both sides of the political spectrum could see themselves in the films, so both supported it.

The films do fall into a basic conservatism, but only if you're willing to think of conservative and liberal in terms broader than Republican Party and Democratic Party. In the 21st century, White Houses of both parties have supported wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both launched drone strikes in countries we weren't at war with. The parties differ in the ends American power should serve, but neither really questions the underlying validity of that power. Both Republicans and Democrats are essentially opposed to radical ideas, and in that sense, both conservative.

And that's essentially where we still are at the end of Avengers: End Game. I wondered, after seeing Infinity War a year ago, where the moral center of the Avengers universe lay. Thanos may have been delusional, but at least his philosophy was internally consistent and coherent. Where was the statement of the good guys' moral center to counter it? Throughout the entire series, the only radicalism, the only suggestions of alternatives to continuing on in the same manner doing the same things, comes from the bad guys. And the good guys don't really waste much time formulating philosophical retorts. The response to "this is all bad and must be destroyed so a better way of doing things can emerge" is always just "you're insane." There is so explanation of why the villain is insane, because that's axiomatic and self-evident. There's a reason the finale chose time travel as a key plot point: in time travel, it's best not to think about it too much. And that's how to deal with the whole series, especially when it comes to questions about WHY we should root for the Avengers.

This refusal to face philosophical threats head-on is a characteristic of comedy. There are many heavy moments in the series, especially in the last two Avengers movies, but at its heart, the series is a comedy. Comedies don't question the underlying rightness of survival, because they are about survival. The Avengers is about the survival of humanity, but by not really saying why humanity should survive, it becomes a paean to the status quo for its own sake

My son is currently the sort of teenager who hates everything. Even he walked away from Endgame saying "most of the jokes landed."

Avengers is sort of like cable news: it will offer equal time to the left and the right, but if you see anyone really radical on there, they're only there to look foolish and be the straw man for everyone else. Iron Man and Captain America can bicker about personal freedom versus public good. They can argue whether the Avengers should act on their own initiative or under the control of a quorum of well-intentioned bureaucrats. But neither is going to argue the Avengers should cease to exist, or that their role is to overthrow the bureaucrats and give people the same level of autonomy the Avengers enjoy for themselves.

It ends a little bit to the right

Although Avengers tried to keep a balance between right and left in order to maintain its profitability, it ended just a bit to the right. How? Well, the entire 22-movie arc is a little bit like the United States itself: it has a Civil War round about the middle of its existence, and that changed everything. Prior to Civil War, Iron-Man was more or less a fuck-you-I-do-what-I-want kind of guy. But after Age of Ultron, he realized that he really needs boundaries, so he was happy to accept a UN proposal to put the power of the Avengers under the authority of a world government. In a twist, law-and-order nerd Captain America was the holdout. (One writer even pointed out this was a twist because Iron Man is the "red" or Republican guy, while Captain America is the "blue" or Democratic guy, but they flipped their roles in the movie relative to how the current reds and blues feel about the UN.)

In a sense, Captain America represents individual-rights-over-state-control Jeffersonian America, while Iron Man is the Hamiltonian who is willing to accept centralization and control for the greater good. Since America has more or less adopted Hamiltonian views, it's appropriate for the anachronistic Captain America to be the one holding on to the old way of thinking. For most of the rest of the series after Civil War, the two powers are more or less equally balanced.

But that's not how it ends. Iron Man is the selfless one. Although he's managed to escape Thanos's mass extermination with his family and good life intact, he's willing to risk it to give others back what they lost. It's really this willingness to risk his own family for others more than his ultimate death stopping Thanos that is the meaningful sacrifice. His willingness to put his own happiness aside for others ultimately gives him a moral authority that Captain America had always held until that point.

Meanwhile, Captain America ends the film in a strangely selfish way. He ditches his superhero responsibilities in order to "get a life" and go have that dance with the girl he loves--the same dance he turned down way back at the beginning of the Avengers' life cycle in order to save others.

This turn gives Iron Man the moral highground by the end. It's significant that after Iron Man makes Captain America promise he won't die when they go back in time to reset the clock, Iron Man never gets to say dying words to Captain America commenting on how it turned out. Captain America isn't that important. The dying words go to Iron Man's family--reaffirming traditional family values.

Ultimately, although Tony Stark's reckless individualism fueled by the extremes of capitalism once put humanity in peril, it was Stark who saved us. Capitalism's winners can save us all if they're just good enough. Iron Man has returned to the right side of the political spectrum, and that return coincides with his redemption.

The Marvel franchise cleverly resisted being pinned down politically over its arc since 2008, and that has fueled its success. The point wasn't to have a point, it was to thrive, and they succeeded wildly at it. Marvel used the apparent back-and-forthness of the series to hide the fact that it was avoiding a deeper back-and-forth that might have happened. You can question how the machine operates, but never the essential inevitability of  the machine itself.

The downside of writer prompts

Occasionally, I'll give writer prompts a try. If you're not a writer, you may be unaware that just like muscle heads can find a thousand workouts-of-the-day on CrossFit fora all over the Internet, writers can find thousands and thousands of writer prompts. There are many purposes to a prompt. At the most innocuous, they're just there to get your juices flowing, as it were, to give you a reason to write something. Hopefully, the thinking goes, writing the prompt may trigger something creative you can use in your real writing. Some prompts are more like an etude in music, meant to develop a particular skill. For example, in order to strengthen your ability to write descriptively, you might get a prompt to describe a scene, only the point-of-view character is upside-down. That kind of thing.

I don't use prompts a lot, but occasionally I find them useful or fun. As the kind of person who craves approval, prompts trigger the person who overachieved on assignments in college. There is a job to do, so I do it. It makes it easier to write without questioning myself why I'm writing, because the answer is that someone told me to write.

On a very rare occasion, the prompt succeeds beyond all reasonable expectation, and I end up with something that goes right into a story. The only problem with this is that I feel like it then becomes obvious that I used a prompt, which would kind of destroy the suspension of doubt of the reader. No artist wants to leave traces of, well, tracing in the drawing they did. It's the same thing for a writer. I just had a breakthrough on a story I gave up on a year ago, but a prompt helped me get there, and that's weighing on me as I continue on with the rough draft.

Maybe I'll just go with it. An artist might playfully leave the tracing paper glued to the canvas. I could just make it clear that part of the story really did start with a prompt. Or is that too corny?

The only thing I'm sure of is that just like every good CrossFit bro must post photos of his workout, I must also post photos of myself writing my prompt.

Intense.