If you grow up around someone autistic you may find yourself being described as, or invited to think about yourself as autistic. Maybe you are. Perhaps, in the way you do life there are the signs, like footprints in the sand, of how you grew used to living with autism. We internalise the world, always attempting to make it our own.
I’m immersed in relentlessly raining blocks: shapes falling without a care for me.
This is my Tetris-dream – life as it is, indifferent to me. The pieces arrive like the complications of every moment I live, every block adding to a pile that might burn, a bonfire of my vanity: thinking I had it under control. Resentment.
As I read this I see where my dream’s pointing: Panksepp’s RAGE drive, that instinctive response to obstruction. This is the tension that builds as the game speeds up. In life it’s one mistake that takes me to the point of frustration but the accumulation, the steady gnawing away at my sense of control as the screen fills.
Time slips away. Life is merciless. Resentment, born from miscalculations, grows until until it looms above me, a tower of unresolved tension.
But the game holds a hand out to me (we’re back with the dream). Clear a line and I feel relief. For a moment I’m out of the chaos. This is anger. Something on the RAGE scale, somewhere between, gently, ‘no’ and I kick the doors down because this house is burning.
Clarity, for a moment. Resolution. It feels better.
But Tetris, like life, offers no real peace unless you’re Harry Hong or someone like him, who probably starts playing Tetris again: everything begins with repetition. The blocks keep raining down. The only way to win is by recognising what comes, adjusting to each and every complication.
This is the silent truth of Tetris. Control is fleeting, just like anger. Survival means accepting the inevitability of disorder, not trying to stop it but finding harmony within its flow.
I dream of sailors on an uncertain ocean, ever-reading the sky and the sea in ways that might escape me – or you. Life is about our powers of prediction, about following the impossible. Patient, sometimes lucky.