Autistic people and music

[Madiel]

Replace "nonsense" with "oxymoron" and there are plenty of famous examples. For instance:

Corneille:

Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles

Shakespeare:

O brawling love! O loving hate!
  O anything of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity!
  Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
  Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.

Byron:

For checker'd as is seen our human lot
    With good, and bad, and worse, alike prolific
Of melancholy merriment, to quote
    Too much of one sort would be soporific

I, for one, can easily imagine someone who has no feeling for poetry, and no knowledge of how it works, crying "Nonsense!".

Yeah... you realise it's a person who is CLAIMING a feeling for poetry who is saying that poetry is often nonsensical? You've just made the exact opposite case.

Anyway, there is a big difference between saying something about poetry in general, and saying something about a particular poem (or song lyric). The fact that poems might do a variety of things artistically does not preclude a particular poem just being clunky and unplanned. The fact that a skilled poet might do a series of these oxymorons doesn't preclude the possibility of someone misusing a word because they have its meaning wrong.

Neil Diamond fans have a tendency to justify the chair line by going into the symbolism of giving the chair a voice. People who aren't Neil Diamond fans are more likely to consider the possibility that he really, really needed a word that rhymed with "there".

[Florestan]

I find it absurd to say that a person who, in adulthood, manifests a mild form or one of the deficits listed above has the same disorder as a person which has Autism as it was originally defined.

I wouldn't say that people currently diagnosed on the mild side of the Autism spectrum don't have a disorder. But I find it absurd to say it is the same disorder.

...

To say that the people who meet the original diagnostic criteria have the same disorder as people who are socially awkward or can't tolerate the feeling of wool on their skin is nuts, in my view.

Totally agreed.

[Florestan]

Yeah... you realise it's the person who is CLAIMING a feeling for poetry who is saying that poetry is often nonsensical?

He wrote "often nonsensical if taken literally". Quite different from "often nonsensical", I'd say.

[Madiel]

He wrote "often nonsensical if taken literally". Quite different from "often nonsensical", I'd say.

Actually lots of things besides poetry are nonsensical if taken literally. Including the way people now use the word "literally" to mean "figuratively"...

But here's the thing: it's perfectly possible to understand that chairs don't have ears and that Neil Diwmond knows this, and still think that Neil Diamond's line is a dumb line. Saying poetry is often nonsensical doesn't help. The reason people say the line is dumb is not simply because they object to the non-literal nature of the line, it's because of the lack of artistic justification for introducing the chair as a character. People can be perfectly happy with Jesus talking about stones crying out and still think the Neil Diamond line is bad. It's got nothing to do with an inability to deal with non-literal meaning, it's simply an assessment of quality. It's not a sign of autism, it's a sign of your taste in songwriting.

[Florestan]

But here's the thing: it's perfectly possible to understand that chairs don't have ears and still think that Neil Diamond's line is a dumb line. Saying poetry is often nonsensical doesn't help. The reason people say the line is dumb is not simply because they object to the non-literal nature of the line, it's because of the lack of artistic justification for introducing the chair as a character. People can be perfectly happy with Jesus talking about stones crying out and still think the Neil Diamond line is bad. It's got nothing to do with an inability to deal with non-literal meaning, it's simply an assessment of quality. It's not a sign of autism, it's a sign of your taste in songwriting.

All true. Yet, from the whole of @Mister Sharpe 's post, especially the subsequent example he offered, I inferred that his father always took everything literally, therefore his labeling Neil Diamond's line as stupid stemmed not from any discriminating taste in poetry but from a completely prosaic personality who probably would have labelled the Shakespeare and Byron verses above as equally stupid.

[Madiel]

Possibly my least favourite lyric in a hit song is in "Africa" by Toto.

The line is "Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti".

I don't hate it because of an objection to the geography. I wasn't even particularly aware that Mount Kilimanjaro is too far away from the Serengeti plain to rise above it.

And I don't hate it because I don't understand that "rises like" indicates a metaphor. I hate it because it's an appallingly lazy and white-centred metaphor. Oh, um, the song is called Africa so I had better mention some African things. Kilimanjaro! That's a cool word! It's a mountain, so it rises... what does this mountain rise like... it rises like a good old European mountain! The home of the gods! That sounds cool!

Rises like a tower. Rises like a phoenix. Rises like thunder. There were so many poetic metaphor options. I don't hate the line because I don't understand poetry, I hate it because I do and I recognise a bad example of the genre. An African mountain rising like a European mountain scarcely even qualifies as a metaphor.

[Madiel]

All true. Yet, from the whole of @Mister Sharpe 's post, especially the subsequent example he offered, I inferred that his father always took everything literally, therefore his labeling Neil Diamond's line as stupid stemmed not from any discriminating taste in poetry but from a completely prosaic personality who probably would have labelled the Shakespeare and Byron verses above as equally stupid.

And yet, the example offered was not Shakespeare or Byron. The example was a line that a LOT of people besides his Dad think is a dumb line. And they would express their critique in a very similar way. It doesn't demonstrate anything unusual about his Dad.

That's my point.

Similarly, not being able to follow one of Liszt's retroactively fitted programs for a symphonic poem does not make a person unusual. There is a very real possibility that the reason people can't follow the program is because Liszt made up the "story" afterwards. It might well be the case that people who say they CAN follow the program are the people who suspend disbelief / drink the Kool-aid a bit more readily than average.