Exuberantly autistic!

 Sliding back in time

I’m writing under rather constrained circumstances – which is ironic. I spent the past 24 hours absorbing exactly how free I am inside. But I am now on a packed commuter train heading home, hugging my newfound insight. 

Visiting my mother, who’s been feeling quite under the weather since her recent stay in hospital, has been a curious joy. We conspired over dinner last night – chocolate mochi are not really a recommended desert for someone in her condition but, being both new to her and deliciously moorish, they lent an air of celebration. For a moment I wished I’d bought beer. Such exuberance felt precious. A gift. 

I want to talk about mapping and memory 

Whenever I visit my family home I have to conduct a close scrutiny of my surroundings. I can’t help myself. It is a compulsion I’ve come to understand as my way of working (I work with family memory after all), but it’s as important to me as breathing. It’s also how I process the world – I’m looking for traces, filling the gaps. 

When you have severe challenge in the area of working memory it is easy to lose your way in life. It’s even easy to lose your way to the fridge! People like me need a trail of breadcrumbs – material memory is one term I’ve heard used a great deal to express the importance of objects, and I think of them as resonant ‘beings’. Objects contain memory – photographs do this especially well as we know, and I love photographs beyond words. 

This post will be about some extraordinary pictures and a new way of thinking about myself. 

I imagine (but can’t know) that as a blind person might navigate through touch, I often say that I feel my way through life and I do – both literally and metaphorically. I have to circle, and scan cupboards, shelves and bookcases. I must open drawers and lift papers, open boxes and hold cups, jug and curios. Not surprising then that mine is also the joy of the thrift store and flea market – though this is a more distant pleasure. 

Some family items become incorporated into my object work (with my mother’s permission of course). This has become a collaboration of sorts. Look! Oh look! we say. She’s grown to understand my ways. My need for these objects is visceral. 

The following morning the bookcase in my mother’s study yielded a curious collection of slides from the Louvre – mainly of Impressionist paintings. Dad must have been very taken. You could get a good money for them on Etsy these days. That’s by the by – it’s just that I spend a lot of time trawling and I know the market. What they offer in that moment is a breadcrumb, an aide memoire – associative thinking is what I rely on.

Several days ago an artist I know called out for a freestanding pull-down projector screen. I have one but didn’t offer – it was out of range, and had spent the past 40 years under my mother’s sofa. Sitting next to it a Braun slide projector of the same vintage. How I came to have these objects is a story of parental hope. After a long struggle with school I had managed to get to university to read Art History – mum and dad must have been overjoyed. Buying me a projector was their loving endorsement of what they imagined was my new found career.  But I, wayward as ever, ditched Art History at the first opportunity! So there it had remained. 

A drawing of the kind of screen the artist was looking for had triggered a memory. I vowed to try out the projector on my next visit home, but had forgotten this entirely until I found my father’s slides from the Louvre. Gracias, papa! 

I ran to the sofa, and the boxes containing both screen and projector were there, dusty yet full of their original promise. Two further moments of dramatic tension ensued. Would the projector work after all this time (yes beautifully!) and would I be able to fix the screen which had unfurled in a fury and come adrift from it’s moorings with an unhealthy twang at first opening! Eventually, yes – but not without bloodshed. Imagine teasing a stubborn and sticky connecting tape from the innards of a hefty metal roller-blind mechanism with forefinger and thumb. They don’t make them like this anymore.

So it was quite a process to resurrect the screen, but the Braun projector emerged as an intuitive machine – using this old technology (to view dad’s early family photos) enhanced the experience. So many layers to ‘old tech’ assisted recall, so many ways in which this viewing signalled a sense of embodied return. You press a button to activate a lever which physically moves the slides one by one – I tried to explain to mum about powerpoint but it didn’t translate. She’s 91 and has never sent an email.

An unexpected adjunct to my recent forays into the land of self-discovery! The camera lens requires a certain stillness in its subjects but I, as a child, appear to have been in almost constant motion! When I am required to be still my body twists, my hands shoot to my mouth, balance seems precarious; but mainly I am brimming with exuberance. Moi? By coincidence I had just left a friend in town the afternoon before, on my way to mum’s, who used this self same word about me. Really? I remarked genuinely surprised. I am not in contact with my own exuberance. 

As a child of the 60s exuberance was probably not welcomed outside the family home. En famille (from the evidence before me) it looks as though I was loved, no to say indulged for it. I suspect this is the secret of my resilience as a late diagnosed autistic human. 

Exuberance is something which can be crushed though, and this is a sadness to me. Though if I was/am that child I see, I can begin to reclaim her. 

This thought brims over and excites me as much as the heady detail of sock and shoe, and each re-remembered dress. Material memory, is a truly wonderful thing. 

NB. 10 days have gone by since writing this piece and I’ve been struggling with flu ever since. I must have caught it on that damn train! 

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