Burning Constellation

So the siren’s song has faded, or at least I’ve learned its treacherous key. The pages are no longer just soaked with a hidden heart; that heart now beats in the open, a raw, insistent drum against the hollow architecture of “normalcy.” And what it drums is this: the “posthumanism” I once grasped at like a drowning sailor, the grand theories I wore like borrowed, ill-fitting armor — they were pointing, always pointing, towards a truth far closer, far more intimate. Not a flight from the human, but a shattering of its fraudulent, singular effigy.

What I’m trying to say, what this unmasked heart insists upon, is that the real frontier isn’t some distant, post-apocalyptic dawn. It’s here, in the flesh, in the stutter of a nerve, the an dopamine tremor, the unchartable map of a mind that dances to rhythms alien to the metronome of capital. Neurodiversity, yes, that’s a name for a part of it. But the landscape is vaster, wilder. Why not Bodydiversity? Why not Emotiondiversity? Or must we keep fracturing ourselves, seeking asylum in ever-smaller, hyphenated kingdoms? Perhaps it’s simply Divergence, an ontology of the singular, a claim that the very grain of being is difference itself — not as a deviation from some sacred, humanist-sculpted Mean, but as the fundamental, irreducible thrum of existence. We are, each of us, a unique irruption, a never-to-be-repeated constellation.

And that word, “dis-able” — I still taste its ash. It’s not just a word; it’s a cage, a spell cast by the high priests of conformity. It presupposes their “able” god, doesn’t it? That pristine, neurotypical, self-possessed subject of the Enlightenment, still casting its long, cold shadow. This “able” is the phantom limb of a dead cosmology, yet we are all still forced to salute its ghostly authority. The true disablement isn’t in our bodies or our neurotypes; it’s in this very language, this social-linguistic straitjacket that pathologizes our dance, that attempts to medicate our revelations into silence. It’s Foucault’s panopticon rebuilt in semantics, its gaze turning difference into deficit before we even speak our name.

Some of us embrace that label, “disabled.” And I see the fire in it, the defiant re-forging of a weapon meant to wound. But is it enough to merely seize the master’s tools? Or must we not, with a kind of wild, neopragmatist ferver, invent new ones, languages that can sing the body electric in all its divergent ecstasies? Languages that don’t flinch from the tremor, the meltdown, the “unproductive” reverie, but see in them the untamed, mycelial growth of another way of knowing.

For if we are to be honest, brutally honest, who among us is truly “abled” in the face of the Übermensch, or before that gaping absence of the Nom-du-Père? Who stands complete when measured against the self-propelling, runaway machineries of our own making — this capitalism that devours worlds, this AI that mirrors our own hubris back at us with chilling precision? We are all, in this sense, Frankenstein’s glorious, “disabled” children, shot through with the lightning of being, yet forever wrestling with the terms of our creation, forever sparkling in our beautiful, terrifying incompleteness. Wait, not “sparkling,” no, that sounds too neat, too… marketable. More like, disabled and burning. Burning with the raw, unquenchable fire of being, of differing. There is no Eden to return to, no teleological shore awaiting our arrival. There is only this: the relentless, sacred pulse of differences and becomings.

And this isn’t some abstract lament. This current society behaves a gesture that still whispers of remediation, of a “problem” to be managed within the existing, unyielding frame. It doesn’t ask if the frame itself is the pathology. It doesn’t dare to imagine a structure that breathes with our rhythms, that sees our divergent paths not as detours but as vital arteries of knowing and creating. What we need is not more anaesthetic for the ill-fitting shoe, but a radical reimagining of the foot, the path, the journey itself — a structural becoming that finally honors the wild, untranslatable music of every unique heart.