Artefacts from Værensland: A Constellation in a Message

On the sacred logic of autistic communication, and the kinship we leave in memes, scripts, and stone.

A meme, a child’s logic, and a sacred loop: this piece explores autistic GLP communication as ancestral, relational language—misread by many, but deeply known by those who carry the long memory of stone.

Introduction

At first glance, the meme shown above is simple enough—funny, even charming. A young child sits behind the wheel of a toy police car, being questioned by a larger, uniformed officer who crouches to meet them at eye level. The format is familiar: adult authority figure, child with unexpected answers. The tension of the scene builds with each exchange.

“Where do you live?”
“With my parents.”
“And where do your parents live?”
“With me.”
“And where do you all live?”
“Together.”

The humour, for most viewers, lies in what appears to be a perfect loop of non-answers. The child’s responses seem to defy logic, to deliberately dance around the officer’s attempt at clarity. There’s an almost vaudevillian rhythm to it—a comedic beat that rests on repetition, frustration, and the child’s unwavering sincerity. From the perspective of the neuro-majority and the dominant culture, the punchline comes from contradiction. The child is asked a series of increasingly specific questions designed to zero in on a particular piece of factual information—an address, a location, a point on a map. But each answer fails to break the loop. Instead of moving forward, the dialogue turns inward, folding in on itself like a linguistic Möbius strip. The adult appears confounded. The audience, amused. This is absurdist humour in miniature: the child, earnest and small, is cast as the unwitting philosopher; the adult, exasperated, is left chasing the illusion of progress.

Underlying the joke is a particular set of assumptions about how language works—about what counts as a valid answer, what qualifies as informative, and what the purpose of communication should be. In this frame, language is a tool for conveying objective information as efficiently and clearly as possible. Answers are meant to be discrete, easily extractable data points: house number, street name, city. From this view, the child’s responses are not just funny—they are wrong. Not because they are untrue, but because they are unhelpful. Because they fail to detach the self from the context of others. Because they point to relationship instead of geography. Because they are—by this logic—missing the point.

But what if they aren’t? What if the child is not confused, nor being evasive, nor cleverly misdirecting? What if their answers are in fact precise—just not within the the dominant frame? What if the loop is not a failure of communication, but a clue that we are asking the wrong kind of question, or listening with the wrong kind of ear? This is where the laughter begins to fade, and something older stirs beneath the surface—something that feels, to some of us, far less like comedy and far more like recognition.

Autistic GLP Lens: Truth in Constellations

But for those of us who speak the language beneath the language—those of us who process gestalt—this meme doesn’t read as absurd. It reads as true. Not literally, perhaps, but in the way that matters most. Each of the child’s answers is not a mistake, but a moment of relational orientation. What looks like evasion to some is, to a gestalt language processor, a perfectly coherent constellation.

Gestalt language processing doesn’t reduce meaning into parts. It doesn’t carve the world into segments labelled “noun,” “verb,” “subject,” “predicate.” Instead, meaning emerges as a whole—through the shape of a phrase, the rhythm of a dialogue, the emotional contour of an exchange. Words are not selected; they are retrieved as wholes, often with tone, mood, and memory folded in. To parse one out from the rest can collapse the structure entirely. Communication, for us, is context-bound—not because we lack precision, but because precision requires context. The meaning is in the relation, not the reduction.

So when the child says, “With my parents,” they’re not avoiding the question. They are locating themselves in the only way that makes sense—in relation to others. The question wasn’t, “What is your address?” It was, “Where do you live?” And the truthful answer to that, for many of us, isn’t a street name. It’s a feeling. It’s a sense of being held in proximity to love, to safety, to familiarity. Then comes, “Where do your parents live?” The child responds, “With me”—a reciprocal truth, offered without contradiction. The adult tries again, pushing for specifics: “Where do you all live?” And the child, steady as ever, answers, “Together.” And they do. Every response is internally consistent. Every answer reaffirms the relational geometry that neurotypical thinking tries so hard to flatten.

This isn’t a failure to communicate. It’s a refusal to sever meaning from connection. And if it feels circular, that’s because it is—but not in the dismissive sense. It is circular in the sacred sense: orbiting a centre, returning by many paths to the truth that home is not a postcode, but a pattern of belonging. We speak in spirals, not because we’re lost, but because we know the centre cannot be reached by a straight line.

To the outside ear, our speech may seem incoherent, our metaphors mismatched, our scripts strange. But for those who speak this way, who live and process in constellations rather than coordinates, this is not confusion. It is recognition. It is kinship. It is knowing that someone, somewhere, has mapped the world in ways you were told did not exist.

The Meme as Marker: Memory Carved in Stone

To most, the meme is a throwaway joke. But for some of us, it is something else entirely. It is not simply a moment of humour—it is a marker. A trace. A glyph from the old language, half-buried in the soil of the internet. And like all true artefacts, it reveals itself only to those who carry its memory.

In The Long Memory of Stone, I wrote about the way autistic people often navigate the world as Stone-Borne People—those who remember without knowing how they remember, who carry ancestral rhythms in their nervous systems, who feel the pull of pattern like a tide. To us, meaning is not only spoken but shaped—relational, resonant, and place-bound. Just as the ancient stone circles remain inexplicable to many who pass them, so too do our ways of knowing often appear mysterious to those outside our culture. These sites—Callanish, Brodgar, Stenness—were not built for tourists with cameras and questions. They were built for kin. For those who could stand within the circle and feel what was held there. The same is true of our memes, our scripts, our fragments of phrase. They are left not to be deciphered, but to be recognised.

This meme, then, is a kind of autistic standing stone. It confounds those who insist on seeing logic only in straight lines. It baffles the neurotypical reader who demands that language be stripped of relationship before it can be understood. But to us—to those who process the world in echoes and textures—it is familiar. Comforting, even. Because we know this pattern. We have said these words. We have been this child, offering answers that made perfect sense until someone asked us to explain them. And we have seen the blank stares, the raised eyebrows, the shrugs of dismissal.

What they miss is that this kind of communication is not meant to be decoded—it is meant to be felt. It is a signal cast into the world, waiting to be received by someone who speaks in the same key. In a world that mishears us, mistranslates us, or reduces us to pathology, we leave behind these waystones—these glimmers of recognition. They are not monuments to what we have lost, but beacons for what we might yet recover: connection without translation. Kinship without compromise. And memory that survives not in history books, but in the strange, precise loops of our language.

Let the lexicographer try to catalogue it, to map the edges and name the pieces. They will not find their way in. The roads that lead to this place are unmarked. But for those who remember the shape of the circle, no map is needed.

Scientific Validation: The Double Empathy Paper

Crompton, C.J., Foster, S.J., Wilks, C.E.H. et al. Information transfer within and between autistic and non-autistic people. Nat Hum Behav (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02163-z

For years, autistic people have been told that we are poor communicators. That we fail to read the room, miss the signals, struggle with nuance. But what if the room itself is the problem? What if the signals we miss were never meant for us, and the nuance we’re accused of lacking is simply a different kind—one tuned to another frequency? In May 2025, a study published in Nature Human Behaviour by Crompton and colleagues quietly, but powerfully, affirmed what many of us have long known: that communication breakdown between autistic and non-autistic people is not rooted in deficit, but in mismatch.

Using diffusion chains—a method where a story is passed from person to person—the researchers found that when autistic people communicated with each other, the message held. Clarity was preserved. Meaning was transmitted, shaped, and passed along with far less degradation than expected. But when the chain crossed neurotypes—autistic to non-autistic or vice versa—friction emerged. Information got lost, rapport declined. The problem wasn’t that autistic people couldn’t communicate. The problem was that neurotypical expectations of how communication should happen were never up for question.

This brings us back to the meme. The child in the toy car is not failing to answer. They are communicating in a logic system that is internally coherent and contextually rich—but illegible to those expecting a different code. The humour of the meme depends on a failure of translation, one that is positioned as the child’s to resolve. But what if the misalignment isn’t a matter of competence, but of culture?

The study also noted that when participants disclosed their diagnostic status, rapport sometimes improved—but not reliably. The deeper resonance still came from shared neurotype space. There, communication didn’t need translation. It didn’t require explaining why something mattered, or how the pattern was being followed. It simply worked.

This is not news to those of us who live it. Many of us find ease and fluency in one another’s presence—not because we’ve trained ourselves out of our supposed deficits, but because we are no longer required to code-switch for survival. Crompton’s work offers something we rarely receive: empirical backing for truths we have been told were misunderstandings, or worse, delusions. The child in the meme is not the problem. The problem is that the officer—and the world they represent—never thought to learn our language.

Synthesis: Constellations, Kinship, and the Cost of Not Being Seen

There is something ancient in the way we speak.

Not old in the chronological sense, not fossilised—but ancestral. Rooted. The kind of ancient that lives in the bones, in the spaces between spoken words. The kind of ancient that doesn’t need to be taught because it was never forgotten. Gestalt language processing—our way of knowing, narrating, remembering—is not an innovation. It is an inheritance. And like many lineages, it has been misunderstood, misnamed, and often mistaken for a flaw.

We do not speak in tidy lines. We speak in constellations. In echoes. In scripts that return, not because we cannot move forward, but because they carry something we do not wish to lose. Our words do not sit still. They move with us, ripple through our bodies, arrive as images, feelings, half-songs. We carry them as shapes and impressions long before we find the sounds to match. And sometimes we don’t. Sometimes the knowing is enough.

This way of being—relational, multidimensional, saturated with memory—is not only unrecognised by neurotypical systems. It is actively overwritten. Clinical frameworks break our speech into fragments and call it delay. Educational rubrics demand clarity without context and mistake it for comprehension. We are asked to explain our metaphors, justify our gestures, reduce our meanings into parts that make sense to others. But no one learns our language in return.

And so, we leave things behind—not because we want to, but because we must. Memes. Scripts. Phrases whispered on repeat. We scatter our metaphors like petals or stones along a forest path, hoping that someone else will come this way and know, without needing to be told, that they are not alone. These traces are not decorative. They are survival tools. A coded cartography. A kin-call.

The meme is one such marker. Not a joke, but a waystone. A shared glint in the eye of recognition. It is not meant to be universal. It is meant to be familiar—to us. For those of us who have answered every question with too much context and still been told we were off-topic. For those who have repeated a line from a film or a cartoon, not to be funny, but because it was the only phrase in that moment that felt true. For those who have been fluent in a language no one else in the room believed was real.

We are not broken for speaking this way. We are not late to language. We are descended from another lineage entirely—one that sings its memory into form, one that encodes belonging in pattern, one that does not separate meaning from the body it moves through.

Let them call it confusion. Let them laugh. We know what it is. It is the long memory of stone. It is the grammar of kinship. It is a language that has never needed permission to exist.

we do not speak, we scatter
for the long memory of stone

i found it—
a pebble
not out of place but perfectly placed
as if dropped mid-step
by someone whose feet walked like mine
whose thoughts tangled like seaweed in spring tides
whose tongue was not late, but braided into silence
until the right glint of sun called it forth.

it was not large.
just a meme, perhaps.
but it sparkled.
not in pixels
—in memory.

they were here.
one of us.
a wayfarer, a whisperer,
a wanderer who left their laughter behind
in the twist of a child’s logic
and the sideways glance of a joke
meant not for the masses,
but for the few of us who know
that sense is not the same as sense-making.

i picked it up
tucked it in my pocket
like all the others:
scripts, fragments,
songs misremembered just right.

we do not speak in straight lines.
we loop.
we spiral.
we return.
and if our words seem like nonsense—
that is only because the map is not for them.
it is for us.

this is the grammar of kinship:
a rhythm,
a resonance,
a pull toward pattern.

we leave stones
not to mark where we end
but to call each other forward.

so if you find this—
this poem,
this meme,
this pebble—
know that i was here
and i knew you were too.

it is the long memory of stone.
it is the grammar of kinship.
it is a language that has never needed permission
to exist.

Final thoughts …

What looked like nonsense was never nonsense. The child’s words—those looping, luminous replies—were not circular in error but circular in design. Like the standing stones of old, they do not yield their meaning to force. They require stillness. Presence. They require a listener who understands that sometimes the answer is not outside the circle, but at its centre.

The meme, once dismissed as absurdity, now stands revealed as artefact. A signal. A marker along a path that winds far beyond the reach of diagnosis or deficit. For those of us who process the world in this way—through pattern, through resonance, through relational tether—it is not a joke. It is recognition. It is proof that someone else has walked this way before, and thought to leave something behind.

We exist.
We remember.
We speak.

And in speaking, we do not always explain. We encode. We scatter glimmers of ourselves in poems, in scripts, in memes that flicker on timelines before sinking back beneath the algorithm. We do not always seek translation. We are not waiting to be studied, or defined, or rescued. We are speaking to each other, in a language of echoes.

That is the truth the meme holds, quietly, in its core. Not a failure to communicate—but a refusal to dislocate meaning from relationship. A child answers, “With my parents.” And we hear the fullness of that. We hear the belonging. We hear the logic not of roads and postcodes, but of kin.

Those who wish to understand us must learn to listen differently. Not for linearity, but for pattern. Not for explanation, but for rhythm. Not for what fits within their schema, but for what pulses beneath it.

We are leaving messages in the open—not encrypted, but unfamiliar. You can find us, if you know what to look for. We are here. We always have been. Scattering our stones. Drawing our circles. Writing our truths not in lines, but in loops. Holding space for the ones still on the way.