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Autistic pursuits and objects of passion: lavish indulgence or crucial intervention?

Autism advocacy can be devastating savagery to the Autistic Artist’s soul. Relentless and aggressive, the crass normative dominance chaffing against autistic fragility, valiantly struggling to be heard amidst Daedalian gyrations, asphyxiating gas-lighting and gelid silence, is crippling.

The Artist needs to recover Sense of Soul, that Clement Space within which emanates forth, once revived and strengthened, as vibrant virtuosity and vitality. Spiritual Sustenance.

And this Autistic Artist has been slowly mending, resuscitating, rearranging, invigorating and awakening Clement Space, Autistic Joy.

An ongoing exercise that is critical to Beingness, that marks the difference between bleak existence and dynamic Life.

This morning, I unearthed an important Object that performs a key role in this unfolding and unpacking. It is non-functional in the mundane utilitarian sense – a pair of old Ferragamo wedge shoes transformed with rocks, cheap plastic baubles and paint. It cannot be worn, it does not fit into the category of High Art, whatever that is spun out to mean, it is not aesthetically pleasing in a general sense, and it has no monetary value. Yet, it is functional because it serves a completely different purpose, sublime yet forcefully tangible to the ones who are able to perceive its potency. For this Autistic Artist, who created this object-thing, it and the act of bringing it out of its storage space, of un-hiding, un-masking, marks another hidden, intimate junction of reflection and compulsion towards healing and growth.