The Speed of Dark: Thought Beyond Language
On Gestalt Language Processing, recursive memory, and writing as a practice of shaping meaning where language arrives late but never empty.
Seven essays, born of overwhelm, gather into a single galaxy: GLP memory, critique, survival, and refusal stitched into fabric. Thought reshapes language here, bending words until they glow at the speed of dark.
Introduction: Gathering Constellations
The invitation was simple enough: would I “speak” at a gathering of speech therapists, sharing my thoughts on gestalt language processing and literacy? I said yes, but not without hesitation. Live speaking has never been an easy fit for me. My language support needs run deep—I require time, scripts, rehearsal, the chance to settle my system before words can emerge. To her credit, the host was gracious. We could record the conversation. I could prepare in advance. We would find a time that worked, even across the ocean—her in the UK, me in California. With those conditions in place, I agreed.
I asked for her questions. She sent them—seven in all. On the surface they looked plain, even ordinary: what do you wish teachers had understood, how do you recognise GLPs, what do you tell parents, what might you change in education? But when I opened the document and read them through, something broke open in me.
It was not that I didn’t know the answers. If anything, I knew too many. Each question did not arrive alone. Each carried with it an entire constellation: lived memory, classroom stories, systemic critique, grief and survival, threads of research I have followed for decades. They rushed in all at once, crowding into the same space, pressing hard against one another. It felt like standing beneath a night sky suddenly alive with stars—too many to count, too many to name—each demanding recognition.
This is what overwhelm feels like in my body. Not emptiness, but excess. Not silence, but too many voices speaking at once. The constellations competed until my system froze: vapourlock. I hovered on the edge of meltdown, unable to hold them all, unable to choose which to answer first.
It took time. Slowly, I began to gather. To breathe. To trace the outlines of each constellation, one by one, until the chaos softened into shape. And when the harvest was complete, I looked down and saw what I had made: more than twenty thousand words. Seven full essays. Each a long answer to one of those deceptively simple questions.
The Process
The seven constellations did not arrive all in the same pitch, key, tone, tenor. They began gently—softer, lighter, not as deep as the ground I usually ask my readers to stand upon. But as the series unfolded, they gathered weight. Depth and complexity accrued. By the end, we were far from the easy opening.
Each piece became, in its way, a model. A mentor text of sorts. Not only in what it said about gestalt language processing, but in how it showed what GLP writing could look like on the page—recursive, textured, circling back on itself until meaning was stitched rather than declared. Each article carried its own style, its own voice, as if to remind us that no single form could ever contain the whole.
In the final piece, I went further still. I wrote the SRSD Think-Alouds into the text itself, showing my process in motion rather than hiding it behind the finished product. It was both demonstration and invitation—this is how I built, and others might build this way too.
I chose to release the series ahead of the event, sending it into the wider community a month or so early. It was, in my mind, a kind of peer review, though not in the narrow academic sense. Autistics and GLPs were never shy about telling me when I’ve missed a mark, when I’ve skimmed too lightly, or when a thought needed to reach further. “What does this have to do with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Jaime?” someone inevitably asked, and they were right to.
To bring these pieces out whole, I had to build carefully. First I storyboarded the questions, seeing them not as isolated prompts but as a sequence. Then I shaped outlines for each, ensuring that they held together across the arc of the series. Only then could I begin layering context, weaving in the lived threads and the theoretical scaffolds. Each step took time, and I let it take the time it needed.
I was grateful for that time. With the event still a month away as I write this, I could allow the process to unfold as it must—slowly, deliberately—so that what emerged was not fragments but a gathered whole.
A Short Digression—The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and GLPs
“What does this have to do with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Jaime?”
I was on a tangent in a staff meeting, and I was trying to inject some small aspect of GLPs into sacred space … nevertheless ….
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis tells us that language shapes thought, that the categories of a tongue constrain the categories of the mind. But what happens when the mind begins without an acquired language at all? When the early ground is silence, or something stranger than silence—gestalt echoes, sensory swells, a matrix of patterns that do not conform to words?
For me, an AuDHD gestalt processor with Level 2 language support needs, language was never home terrain. It arrived from outside, a foreign current pressed against a system that already knew how to move. Scripts were borrowed, lines echoed, phrases carried whole. They were not building blocks but costumes—worn, repeated, turned over until they fit just enough to pass. If Sapir and Whorf imagine thought as contained within the lattice of grammar, then here the lattice never fit. Thought spilled wider, stranger, recursive.
In this light, the hypothesis folds in on itself. If all language is foreign, then thought is not bound by any one tongue. Instead, language becomes a tool for translation—of gestalts into fragments, of sensation into form. The world is not narrowed by grammar but distorted by it, bent into alien shapes that never quite match the original. Meaning lives first in the body, the pattern, the gestalt. Language comes later, as approximation.
Perhaps this is the deeper reversal: for us, it is not that language shapes thought, but that thought endlessly reshapes language, bending it to carry what it was never designed to hold.
… My colleagues bid me shut up, so the meeting could continue as scheduled …
The Collected Stories: The Answers to the Seven Interview Questions
Where the Echo Lives: The Early Signs of Gestalt Language Processing.
Literacy for Sale: How the “Science of Reading” Became an Industry—and Why GLPs Are Left Behind.
Echoes that Open Doors: Everyday Strategies for GLP Literacy.
Building Classrooms where Both Gestalt and Analytic Learners Thrive.
If I Could Change One Thing: The Autistic Heroine’s Journey into Literacy.
The Answers to Follow Up Questions
Resistant, Non-Compliant, Whole: The Case Against Phonics as Gatekeeper.
Marked Down for Fidelity: How Colleges Misread GLP Depth—and How to Fix It.
When Linguistics Polices the Edges of Autism: A ‘Peer Review’ of Beals’ Critique of GLP / NLA.
When the Evidence Is Lived: A GLP Journey into Reading, Writing, and Belonging.
When the Words Don’t Land: Hyperlexia, Gestalt Language Processing, and the Long Road to Meaning.
When “Evidence” Requires Harm: GLP Beyond the Gold Standard.
The Evidence Was Already There: How Autism Research Misheard Moral Expression.
The Shape of Language: Revisiting Prizant in the Age of Understanding.
Softness Before Speech: On Safety, Resonance, and the Violence of Forcing Language.
Before the Parts Had Names: Revisiting Peters and the Gestalt Lineage Beyond Positivism.
Ethics Before Evidence: Conducting Small-Scale Action Research in Neurodiversity-Affirming Practice.
The Architecture of Coherence: On Attunement, Expression, and Resonance.
Some Relevant Previous Articles
Why do doctors recommend extensive therapies after an autism diagnosis?
More Than Silence: ‘Non-Verbal’ Autistics and the Limits of Language.
Exploration Is Its Own Proof: The Ecology of a GLP Classroom.
Surviving a job interview as a ‘non-verbal’ autistic person.
The Forgotten Science of Language: What Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev Knew About GLPs.
The Poem Is the Meaning: Why AP Poetry Analysis Misses the Point.
If You Wanted an OSAC for ABA: Why Radical Transparency Terrifies the Behaviour Analysis Industry.
Rebuttals to the “Evidence-Based” and “Gold Standard” Arguments
The Business of Proof: Inside the Evidence Mills Powering the “Science of Reading.
Paper Mills, False Credentials, and the Illusion of Evidence.
The Perils of ‘Paper Mills’: How Low-Quality Research Endangers Autistic People.
Everything you need to know about literacy and related concepts: an autistic info dump.
Literacy for Sale: How the “Science of Reading” Became an Industry—and Why GLPs Are Left Behind.
From Public Funds to Private Profits: The Twisted Path of Autism Research Money.
The Science of Erasure: Gestalt Processing and the Fight for Dignity. (1 of 3)
Blueprints for a Human Zoo: Reading Walden Two Against the Grain. (2 of 3)
The Gospel of Control: Reading ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’ Against Its Disciples. (3 of 3)
Published Is Published: On the Visibility of Evidence and the Politics of Citation.
When Compliance Becomes Unsustainable: Arizona and the Collapse of Behavioural Empire.
The Questions from the 2025 Conference—Answered
Answering the Questions: Reflections from the GLP 2025 Conference Keynote.
When Proof Meets Pattern: Teaching Geometry through “Identify, Represent, Compute, Check.” (aka, teaching maths to GLP students)
Extra Time as Equity: Teaching at the Tempo of Comprehension. (aka, teaching reading comprehension to GLP students)
An Exhale: Threads Through the Constellation
Set side by side, the seven pieces form a single constellation. Each began as its own response to a question, arriving with the intensity of a separate starfield—too bright, too crowded to hold all at once. Now, drawn together, they have settled into relation. What began as scattered constellations has become a galaxy, gravity pulling fragments into orbit, fusion kindling new light at the points of contact. The work of assembling them has been no small thing: aligning vectors, resisting collapse, harnessing the centrifugal forces that might have spun them apart. Out of that turbulence, a larger shape has emerged—one luminous body, composed of many.
The first essays opened gently. They began with memory and recognition: the child whose scripts were misread as silence, the early signs of fidelity to rhythm and phrase that most adults overlook, the reassurance to parents that their children are not late but moving in a different season. These softer entries laid the ground by naming what is so often unseen.
From there, the series gathered depth. Everyday strategies—echo, modelling, rhythm—expanded into critiques of classrooms built only for analytic minds. What began in practice moved toward theory, until the “Science of Reading” was revealed not as science at all, but as a form of enclosure, an industry that profits by keeping GLPs in a state of permanent remediation.
The arc closed with refusal. Instead of offering a tidy solution to “fix” education systems, the final piece stepped outside the framing altogether. It traced the Autistic Heroine’s Journey: burnout, sanctuary, and the slow weaving of a new ordinary where literacy, like life, is plural, relational, and resistant to simplification.
Across the whole, the threads become clear:
Recognition: scripts are language, echoes are beginnings, silence is not absence.
Difference: GLP pathways are not delays but distinct forms of meaning-making.
Critique: systems cast us as deficits to preserve their own order and markets.
Survival: sanctuary is carved in classrooms, in communities, in writing itself.
Refusal: the most honest response is not to mend the system’s framing, but to name it false.
Taken together, the seven essays are not fragments but a fabric. They move from soft beginnings to deep refusal, from lived memory to systemic critique, from the overlooked script to the heroine’s journey. Each is a mentor text of what GLP writing can look like—different in style, yet stitched together by the insistence that literacy is multiple, relational, and ours.
And if you have followed the series to this point, you will have seen the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis folding in on itself. The lattice never fit. Each essay showed, in its own way, that thought spilt wider than the frame it was given—stranger, recursive, unwilling to stay within the neat categories of grammar or curriculum. What you have read is not language shaping thought, but thought reshaping language, bending it until it can carry what it was never designed to hold.
This is why the seven pieces could not remain fragments. Each was an act of translation: of gestalts into fragments, of sensation into form, of lived experience into words that will always be approximation. Alone, they were partial. Together, they reveal the distortion more clearly. Language narrows, yes—but meaning persists. Meaning lives first in the body, in the pattern, in the gestalt. Language follows, late, trailing behind like a translation that never quite captures the original.
And yet, in the act of bending language, something else happens. New forms emerge. The constellation becomes galaxy, the fragments a fabric. What began as overwhelm—too many constellations colliding at once—has become testimony that thought cannot be contained by a single pathway, nor literacy by a single frame. You have witnessed the reversal: not language enclosing thought, but thought endlessly remaking language, refusing to be enclosed.
The Speed of Dark
Everyone knows
the speed of light.
Measured, constant,
a number etched into textbooks,
a promise that illumination
always wins the race.
But no one speaks
of the speed of dark.
Darkness does not travel—
it waits.
It is there first,
patient, unmeasured,
the canvas on which light
must prove itself.
This is where thought begins.
Not in the lattice of grammar,
not in phonemes or drills,
but in the body,
the rhythm,
the gestalt.
Meaning lives whole
before language carves it
into fragments.
The essays you have read
were born here,
in the dark.
Each one a flare
against the silence,
translation after translation,
gestalts bent into words
that never quite fit,
yet shine enough to be seen.
Set side by side,
the fragments became constellation.
Constellations,
drawn together,
became galaxy.
Gravity held them,
fusion sparked,
and out of turbulence
a luminous body emerged.
But remember:
light was late.
Darkness carried it first.
This is the reversal.
Not language shaping thought,
but thought reshaping language,
forcing words to stretch,
to fracture,
to glow in colours
they were never meant to hold.
My writing lives at this speed.
Not the speed of light—
linear, measurable,
bounded.
But the speed of dark—
recursive, overflowing,
unwilling to be enclosed.
So when you ask
how these words arrive,
how a thousand fragments
can form one galaxy,
I can only answer this:
I write
at the speed of dark.
Wow, Jaime! My mind is neither overwhelmed or underwhelmed...it is transported, which is a nice, embodied way or reacting...of joining you, and human-kind, in the kind of spiral that extends outward and inward at the same time. Someday, I will add my notes, because as a solidly-right-handed, left-brained child before the bilateral keystrokes of computers, I was the most boring of writers...And anecdote I often tell is that I got a C+ on my 'autobiography' in third grade, and vowed never to write again. But later, when I wanted to 'write from the heart' for a particular reason, I tried the exercises of writing from the other hemisphere (with my left hand), and finally, language became embodied for me. I was 40 years old at the time, and the transformation in my writing slowly filtered into my oral language expression too...and now I can see my earlier 'dual processing' self return to its roots, which I never knew were there. [p.s. Oh, I guess I just added my notes]