Star Gazing

A guest zine by Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms), in her own voice. One thread followed down three scales — relational quantum mechanics, the cosmic microwave background, and Deleuze — to the same shape: difference comes first, and the baseline is the thing that got built. It ends where the flat line, and even the spiky profile, give way to a constellation of intensities: a self that is dynamic, relational, and never finished. Ten spreads.

Emergence and the murmuration — a flock has no captain, and neither does a self. Hundreds of thousands of starlings make vast rolling shapes with no leader and no plan: each bird tracks only its six or seven nearest neighbours (Ballerini & the STARFLAG project), and the whole emerges from that one local rule. Philip Anderson's “More Is Different” (1972) is the spine — the founding statement of anti-reductionism: at each level of scale new laws appear that the parts don't contain, so knowing the parts never rebuilds the whole. The early universe did the same, self-organising faint density ripples into the cosmic web with no architect. Two payoffs land it home: the whole person is realer than any diagnostic checklist of parts (you are not a list of deficits — you are the murmuration), and our best neurodivergent collectives — NeurodiVentures — are leaderless murmurations, not org charts (competency networks and catalysts rather than leaders; decisions where the knowledge lives). A “the whole exceeds the parts” zine. Held with care: leaderless is not structureless. Eight spreads, flock-and-web diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.

How neurodivergent knowledge and community grow, read through star stuff — no trunk, no center, many doors. A tree has one trunk and a chain of command; you climb it or you're lost. A rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari) has no root to ask permission of, so you can enter anywhere — Spiky Profiles → Monotropism → Deep Attention, or in from burnout, or a word that finally fit. No prerequisite, no gatekeeper. And a mycelium is the life in that shape: fungal threads carry nutrients and signals between trees that never touch (the “wood wide web,” Simard), thickening the paths that help and letting the rest fade; a brainless slime mold rebuilds the Tokyo rail network (Tero et al.). Zoom all the way out and the shape returns — the cosmic web of dark-matter filaments, the universe's largest structure, looks like a mycelium, like a neuron: not a pyramid, a web. We're already building it. Gray-Hammond and Munday name it neuro-anarchy; the Autistic Rhizome is “a network with no single point of origin,” members as equals held by a do-no-harm ethic, resilient because nothing depends on a center (with Helen Edgar's watering holes). Where the map meets soil is Cavendish Space. Decentralization isn't disorder — it's the oldest structure there is. Eight spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.

On the old word for fate, and the newer word we made of it — a guest zine by Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms), rehoused in the Star Stuff style. Long before “weird” meant strange, wyrd meant becoming: Old English wyrd comes from weorþan, “to become,” and is twined with the root of “worth.” Fate was never drawn as a straight line from birth to death but as cloth — the Norns' weaving at the well beneath Yggdrasill, the “web of man” — many threads crossing, none load-bearing alone. The Weird Sisters carried the word down through Holinshed to Shakespeare's Macbeth; over centuries “weird” drifted into an insult, and Autistic and disabled communities have run that drift backward, taking it up again as a name, not a verdict — which is etymologically honest, not just cheek. Held with care: wyrd is not a script, not doom, not a synonym for wrong, not something done to you alone. Under the root, weorþan meant “to become,” never “to be”: nobody is finished, and becoming was never the flaw — it was the design. You were never written; you are still being woven. Nine spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set, a “threads already running” map of its kin in the collection, and Helen's own sources & notes.

Relational quantum physics, and what it means to be Autistic — a guest zine developed after Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms) from her essay “We Are Made of Relations.” In Carlo Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics a particle has no standalone properties; what it is becomes definite only in relation to another system (Rovelli, 1996). The count gives it away: two distinct coins make four outcomes, but two identical bosons make only three — what's fundamental isn't the standalone particle but the symmetry, the relation (Webster, 2026). Karen Barad calls the relation-before-parts intra-action; the human version, intradependence — made of each other, deeper than interdependence — Helen draws from Barad too. Read through Deleuze, “objects emerge out of more fundamental processes of differentiation”: difference first, then relation, and the tidy standalone object is the thing that got built. The payoff lands on our own work — the double empathy problem (Milton, 2012) lives in the relation, not one mind, and Helen widens it into DEEP; and in the ARLES ladder Relational sits near the base with Regulation inside it, because regulation is relational, so you change the field, not the person. Held with care: not quantum mysticism, not “everything is connected” as a vibe, not dissolution into sameness — the spiky profile survives the merge. A rhyme, not a proof. Nine spreads, seven diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.

Migration, monotropism, and the galaxy you're already made of — a guest zine by Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms), written after Brigit Anna McNeill's The Living Page migration workshop and rehoused here in the Star Stuff style. Every migrating body is made of matter that already migrated once, so migration was never a metaphor borrowed from animals: it's one of the oldest facts about star stuff. A bird crosses an ocean on a compass sense we still can't fully explain — light striking cryptochrome in the eye makes a pair of electrons whose spins stay linked, and that linked pair is thought to be part of how it reads the Earth's faint field (Hore & Mouritsen; Mouritsen). Entanglement's lesson: once two things have been in relation, they stay in relation — separateness was always the less accurate story, which is Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics in a wingbeat. Zoom out and the pattern holds: the Sagittarius dwarf is still arriving in our halo, and the Milky Way–Andromeda collision everyone called settled is now closer to a coin-flip (Sawala et al., 2025) — a tug, not a destination. Then the turn inward: the bodily restlessness that builds before anything is decided is monotropism's gravity, attention gathered into a few bright points rather than spread as an even glow — and masking teaches us to quieten it until we lose our own north. Neuroqueering is the refusal; Pernille Fraser's “Can we trust the space you offer?” asks it from the other side. Widened by ethodiversity and the double empathy problem, and by Barad's intra-action — the liminal crossing isn't empty transit, it's where the shaping happens. Closes past the spiky profile: not a chart, a constellation of intensities. Eleven spreads, eight diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set, and a threads-already-running map of its kin.