Something Wrong With You

There is one ‘right’, ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ way for human brains and human minds to be configured and to function (or one relative narrow ‘normal’ range into which the configurational functioning of the human brains and minds ought to fall). If your neurological configuration and functioning (and as a result your ways of thinking and behaving) diverged substantially from the dominant standard of ‘normal’ then there is something wrong with you. – Nick Walker.

When you first read the above you would agree, however this was written by someone who has autism and the article it was taken from demolishes the idea that there is something ‘wrong’ and replaces it with something ‘different’. The power of words is such that we agree to many things without a challenge because we are told them as a fact and therefore what to believe.

With that in mind listen to the news and be aware how much you are being told. See how that resonates with you then challenge it by thinking, ‘why this why now’ and then see what happens to the BBC spell. This process goes on all the time I see it in schools with the idea that a child who thinks differently has a ‘labelled’ condition, the path to hell is paved with good intent and it is easy to say that the child has a problem but the awareness of difference is important here as it might suggest that the context needs looking at.

Anyone who has had lessons with me in the past who were dyslexic would attest that when you approach things from a different angle will see skills and strategies that the quote ‘normal’ do not have. I make a point when being told that somebody is dyslexic or has some other condition that that may benefit certain aspects of playing music. This is often greeted with surprise by the parent but it is true that these people are far more sensitive musically than the people who are the norm.

Now I am not saying that these people will not find life in this society difficult because there is a problem with society and that is the issue. I also do not have an answer because there isn’t one, in actual fact this is born from the same thought structure as the problem itself. However embracing difference is something that we need to do and need to be aware of. Being able to spot dualism in language patterns and why it happens in the way that it does goes some way to expose how language is used ‘on you’.

So how does that feedback into music and the arts? The last thing you want as an artist is to be normal; to embrace difference and find its beauty and its skills whether that is yourself or in others and work with it creating new possibilities. Someone who is autistic will have strategies in order to fit in and these are resources that we often ignore because they come from someone who has ‘something wrong with them’ however in another point in the timeline these people would have been the seers, navigators and healers in the community, but not now. I guess that is the price progress.

as things move in cycles it is possible that we could return to a point in time when things we consider as a medical condition now will be viewed more optimistically but I cannot see that in the foreseeable future. We can make a start by realising that the benchmarks of normality that we had set for ourselves are not real and to some extent they have been put there by people who wish to control aspects of society. So be troublesome! The pointers for this are the artists and musicians of the 1960s who obviously had some form of ‘labelled condition’ in retrospect such as Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and at least to some extent John Lennon (addictive personalities, compulsive behaviours and all on the spectrum) and they all had a massive CIA and FBI file on each of them, I think that says it all.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three day music summer school for rock