Dignified roles - by David Seagrave

Will I ever be allowed to play a dignified role ?

Dignified roles have eluded me for most of the years since I moved to Scotland in 1991.I feel very acute loss of dignity unless I am “pulling my weight in society” This has arisen because of what happened as a boy and whenever I was unemployed.My father rubbed into me that I was innately flawed because I had no GOOD MANNERS and had forgotten things like christmas carols.A state of grace was conditional on holding down a job,and also by extension conforming to Christian values that meant REGULAR WORSHIP and Christian marriage and siring offspring.I was in permanent disgrace after a school expulsion in 1953 for preposterously trivial pranks where I was dared to misbehave by smutty minded classmates. I was convinced that I was a dangerous lunatic.I would be LOCKED UP FOR LIFE at Red Hill Remedial School which in fact was NO “Broadmoor for Boys” but an intellectual hothouse that has decisively moulded my character. In my father s eyes I had besetting moral failings for getting sacked because for instance I could NOT ADD UP salaries in the old money fast enough or accurately enough at the Inland Revenue .When I was sacked from a job at a London museum I was told to my face that I had been taken on against their better judgment and I would not get references from them. I threatened to end my life.I did not go head first into the Thames because I had a university application in the pipeline .I was then admitted to a mental hospital where I was fortunately allowed to attend A level classes and do Past Papers .Yet that short spell in a mental hospital was to debar me ever after from graduate level employment as I had to disclose it on every job application.It blotted my copybook as surely as a prison sentence for something really bad

It is a strange paradox that just before the sacking I had deliberately chosen to miss that 7.43 train from Hastings to London which piled up at Hither Green with the loss of many lives.I might have perished in the crash but a row with my father about that event has prompted me to write about my fictional classmate Alan Wright who dares to invent a better code of behaviour than Christian morality

After graduation the Permanent Disgrace of unemployment resumed and did not end until I was maimed in 1981 I wore my heart on my sleeve at interviews I soon realised that I could never become a university lecturer and my self esteem collapsed as a Catholic landlady made gratuitously offensive remarks that I was sponging off the State.The paradox of a triumphant recovery from the maiming led to a decade of halcyon years in Stafford but I hankered to climb every Scottish peak so moved to Cumbernauld in 1991.Apart from my roles in now defunct arts organisations and environmental pressure groups I have had NO dignified roles and my life has imploded into abject egocentric futility. Every time I offered to share all the lifelong fruits of my self-createdness I elicited humiliating rebuffs

My essentially fragile self esteem is rooted in my prowess at intellectually demanding pursuits which are frowned upon in Scotland precisely because they expand brainpower. I have been made to feel deeply ashamed of my interest in model railways yet I am the ONLY MAN in Dunfermline who builds railway models (as opposed to playing with Hornby or similar glorified toy trains) .When I die will all these models be DUMPED? . As I grow too infirm to climb lofty mountains I cannot contain my grief since so much of my self esteem is tied up with my role as the veteran amputee climber YET I am rejected by outdoor fraternities who call me a LIABILITY because I have a false leg !.This morning I received quite an insulting rebuff from an organisation because I had sent them “Grow Your Dragon s Wings “ and “Red Haired Roderick” which explicitly illustrate how we Aspies can rise beyond the reach of scorn by prowess at demanding pursuits of every kind The more I probe into the workings of organisations purportedly dedicated to the well being of people with medical conditions the more I discover that their real function is to aggrandise churchpeople with denominational axes to grind who enjoy lording over their clients and ramming their dogmas down their clients throats.Any display of personal initiative on the part of anybody with a distressing medical condition is seen as INSOLENCE .and a threat to the inflated egoes of the Christian people in charge of the organisation..therefore that person must be put down,belittled,ignored,and if he persists,be besmirched so badly that he is silenced as surely as if he was locked up as a certified lunatic.

Everybody needs to feel valued .I was jackbooted as a boy by authority for such preposterous reasons as looking up swear words in a dictionary ! (and how could I have possibly imagined then that far into the future I would be pursued by gangs of Scottish children who smashed the windows of my home, and stole NINE scooters,and how I was in trouble for mentioning the religion of my tormentors! ) Even though I feel proud of all my achievements I am forever plummeting into deep depression every Sunday because I am alone with nobody to talk to and reminded that it is the LORD S DAY ! as in my mind s ear I hear my fathers reprimands and feel that my very name STINKS of ignominy because I have failed to hold down a job.

Dignified roles are as necessary to our well-being as..a proper diet.We define ourselves primarily by our occupational roles.Mental illness supervenes as surely as night follows day if our self esteem is confiscated.We cannot exist in solitude ; and self-banishment only exacerbates our distress..Yet we collide head-on with dysfunctional Society as we think differently.We are as lost,in crowds of self-destruction-intent people,as surely as we are in pathless forests.As we have figurative periscopes that enable us to see far beyond the mindless mobs,we instinctively act in ways that preserve the environment .
Our habits elicit scorn,reprimands, , ridicule .yet we should expect congratulations .

Some of us have taken to heart the teachings of great thinkers down the ages.I am adamant that Socrates,Plato and Aristotle provided Mankind with a better Code of Behaviour than dogma-encrusted Christian morality. Plato declared that spiritually advanced people are those who have left the cave of ignorance for the sunlight of personal growth.He also explained the workings of the emotions ; three dark horses of Greed and Fear and Aggression and one white horse called Reason; and the Charioteer has to bridle the dark horses and allow the white horse of Reason to keep the Personality on the road of life long self-improvement Long before I studied Plato
in depth I had absorbed his teachings…at Religious Knowledge lessons led by a vicar!

So I created Alan Wright,the Socrates of Charford,as a role-model who lives his exemplary life by applying his exacting Code of Behaviour to everyday affairs.IF Alan was a real person I would right now be his loyal disciple –colliding head-on with small minded Christian people by seeking to lead trainloads of deserving people up mountains every fine Sunday and teaching them all my demanding hobbies on dark winter evenings.As everybody surely knows I was forbidden to emulate Plato and set up a one-man university for Aspies in Edinburgh ..because I live “in a foreign country “! the Kingdom of Fife ! yet it would not have cost the management a single brass cent as I can travel for free !.. they would still have objected because of imagined risks to Aspies on hikes in Holyrood Park ! and with soldering-irons etc.

“No man is an island” and those of us singled out for derogatory labelling still have to come to terms with Society which rejects us .I have been officially and indelibly besmirched on a Government disclosure form by Cumbernauld people (I must not mention their religion or that WILL land me in real trouble) There is a catch line in Sartre s HUIS CLOS “ I am the skylarks mirror,my darling “ ( uttered by the lesbian Ines Serrano that got the play BANNED till 1967 !) A skylarks mirror is someone who so frequently belittles anybody that the victim believes it and takes it to heart . Everybody sees themselves reflected in their neighbours.A well adjusted person can safely ignore the few who try to besmirch him. I have Alan Wright say “I see myself reflected in 5,000 windows.Does it matter if a few are dirty ?” The windows are the people of Charford , his neighbours. We with our social impairments do not find enough clean mirrors to be reflected in as we rightly distance ourselves from the moronised common herd .Yet this is the intractable heart of our collision with Society where all our talents count for nothing when we encounter the ingrained prejudices of people far less capable than ourselves in those disciplines where we shine. In Scottish society anybody with a morally neutral attribute is STILL a target for malicious besmirchment.as my experience proves. No matter how gifted the victim may be or what he might contribute to the common good he is judged for the peculiarity rather than all that is good about him.This is explicit in the very title “Red- haired Roderick”. Whereas when at Glasgow University I was accepted as a typical classic English eccentric .in Cumbernauld I felt like a Jew in Nazi Germany and that culminated in my own personal Kristallnacht in 2000 when mobs smashed my windows and I lived from hour to hour in fear of being SLAIN by gangs of children.

For all the beauty of the Scottish scenery I am desperate to quit Scotland I felt good yesterday as while walking I appreciated the whin in bloom by the roadside and reflected that if Mankind continues to wreck Earth quite soon there will be NOBODY ALIVE to thank God for the whin in bloom on a fine May evening I worked on a model viaduct and felt that it was utterly pointless to continue with that or anything else that I used to enjoy doing since I had NOBODY to share it with.I had offered those wanton fruits of my Asperger mind and was ignored or rebuffed with dark hints that anybody who dares to dissent from the motheaten Christian dogmas of our masters will be banished from society yet what DOES society offer me? Only FOOTBALL and SOAP OPERA and BINGE DRINKING ! No wonder I feel as I did in Cumbernauld that I am the ONLY JEW IN DUNFERMLINE so I dream of Stafford as my home town where I was valued as a hero ( who went on all night vigils in November watching for nuclear weapons convoys !) I wake in Dunfermline feeling that I am as bad as a paedophile.

Even if someone was a university professor he deserves to forfeit a dignified role in Society if he behaved like Josef Fritzl But myself ! the worst I can ever do to anybody is swear at them !

…then I have nightmares which are re-runs of the assault in my bedroom in 2005 with children ransacking my home and a boy holding my craft knife to my throat ,or equally scary re-enactments of events in Cumbernauld- glasses smashed by small girls and helpless as a bus bears down on me …I wake in terror far from Stafford and weep .

…and were I to try to teach my specialist interests would potential pupils land me in court because THOU SHALT NOT : use soldering irons; superglue; hammers,,saws,files,let alone a modelmaking lathe .THOU SHALT NOT develop colour films (still assuming I can buy colour developer ) and THOU SHALT NOT defile the sanctity of the LORDS DAY by taking parties of hikers to the Highlands ….this is Scotland in the 21st century fast regressing to Independence days when everybody pried into one another s affairs and made moral judgments about one another for such matters as their BEDTIMES!

Will I ever be allowed to play a dignified role?

David Seagrave