Quoting andrew burke <[log in to unmask]>:
> Les Murray has publicly stated he is aspergic. Andrew
>
Indeed he has.
Here are some draft sentences from my inchoate piece on the general subject...
Les Murray’s ‘Portrait of the Autist as a New World Driver’, from his fourth
collection, Lunch & Counter Lunch (1974). I confess that when I first read it
the word autist meant only to me something about autos. Since then Murray has
written about his autistic son and in interviews and the Alexander biography,
both depression and autism have been discussed.
A car is also
a high-speed hermitage. Here
only the souls of policemen can get at you.
Murray is registering the characteristically autism-spectrum feel of protected
seclusion inside a car even at speed.
(The world’s most famous autist, Temple Grandin, author of Thinking in Pictures,
etc., has shown on tv her home-made hugging machine, and her expertise in
designing calming enclosures for cattle.[Claire Danes is to play Grandin in some
planned biopic!])
Murray reveals his awareness of the personality category he and other artists
belongs to, not just childlike but like an only child:
among the self-taught
the loners, chart-freaks, bush encyclopedists
there are protocols, too: we meet
gravely as stiff princes, and swap fact:
did you know some bats can climb side on?
Murray, from early on, has recognized his peculiarity, built on it, and of
course has always also had what the blurb of his book claims, ‘a many-toned
voice’, presenting ‘a tolerant, multifarious order’. Things and their thinginess
do bulk larger in his work than human relationships, it seems to me.
Max
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