(blasted heat)

(blasted wind)

Janet Frame's mystical conception of her creative source was a place called Mirror City, where a demanding Envoy waited for her to bring her memories and perceptions to use as foundations for the palaces she built there - her novels and stories. At the end of the third volume of her autobiography The Envoy from Mirror City, she has the Envoy say,

What does it matter that often as you have departed from Mirror City bearing your new, imagined treasures, they have faded in the light of this world, in their medium of language they have acquired imperfections you never intended for them, they have lost meaning that seemed, once, to shine from them and make your heart beat faster with the joy of discovery of the matched phrase or cadence, the clear insight. Take care. Your recent past surrounds you, has not yet been transformed. Do not remove yet what may be the foundation of a palace in Mirror City.

Writers who are mostly Rememberers as opposed to inventors are very often Aspies like me, I think. If male, like Jack Kerouac, they may follow the common male Asperger pattern of using alcohol to relieve the chronic anxieties of coping in the bizarre and confusing society of NeuroTypicals. If Female, they may follow that pattern and study and mimic NTs to the best of their abilities, withdrawing to seclusion at every opportunity and for as long as practicable.

In many of us the compulsion to record and transform every memory and perception begins as soon as one can write, because the mind processes so slowly, and too often memories evaporate before that processing takes place. To incorporate them, then, we preserve them and study what we've written or drawn until it becomes a part of us.

We keep Childmind into old age. It's our neurology - the emotions never mature. And although this gives us a rough life - we never figure out how to be grown-up; we falter without tenders and managers - at this point in my own life I finally find Childmind a blessed relief. I am able to see the world fresh every day.

Grief and confusion because of my alienated family consumes me still, when I let it, but gradually I am learning how to let that pain go and stay present and mindful of life where I am.

Consuming Aspie biographies like bonbons these past months has paid off with understanding and some peace. Those shy turbulant socially ill-equipped artists so focused on their work that great palaces rose up around them - what matter they were built of mirrors?