1:47am January 29, 2015

“
A ‘Nobody Nowhere’ was a term for a person who nobody really knew, who lived inside of themselves, not really letting the world connect with them, living 'at a distance’, detatched from the body, the mind, the presence they had in the external world, what I called
'THE WORLD’.

A Nobody Nowhere was someone who balanced that prison-sanctuary of one’s own world, walking that fine line between the solace of being unknown, invisible, self contained & still so full of passion that you almost want to break through & scream & wave & dance & cry in all your idiosyncracy

(& hopefully not get locked up for doing so)
”

—

Donna Williams, powerpoint presentation

That was me.

That was why Nobody Nowhere made such a huge impression on me that I have never had from a book, before or since. This was the version of the book that I picked up in the library. This is the book that alternately thrilled me and terrified me by writing all my sed

]One of Donna’s first statues, brilliant as always. She holds her own world in one hand, staring at it intently, while her other hand is held up to keep other people from seeing her. She is totally exposed to the outside world, and totally unaware of the degree of her exposure, what people are thinking of her, even that people are thinking of her. She is completely mesmerized by the way her body processes information, and completely oblivious to the fact that there are onlookers, everywhere.

This statue hits home so hard that, had I had the money when it came out (and I remember when it came out, and I will never have such money – it’s a life-size,, high-quality bronze statue after all), I would have bought it in a heartbeat. It represents a time in my life when I had not a trace of Peter Singer’s definition of personhood. It represents the relatively frequent times in my life when I involuntarily slide back into that state of mind. And it is absolutely, hauntingly beautiful.

This is my other favorite, it’s smaller and it’s called Trust. I know that feeling too, but I never even began to feel it until I was 19 – and then only in the most sparing way, induced by another autistic person who wanted me to rest from my hypervigilance – and I never began to feel it for real until my late twenties.

Just as Anne and I have photographs of ourselves that look remarkably similar, there are two photographs – one of me, one of Donna – that, as she describes her own, are “as much a Nobody Nowhere as a camera could capture”.

If not obvious, the first photo is Donna, and the second photo is me, but the resemblance is as uncanny in some ways as some childhood pictures of me and Anne. (I am far more like Anne than I am like Donna, but all three of us represent very closely-put-together points on the autistic continuum.)

I love her artwork. My style is completely different, but we both manage to capture a ‘sensing’-eye view of the world:

“Severe language processing disorder and inability to visually process faces, bodies, rooms, objects as a whole (simultagnosia), left me largely meaning deaf until late childhood and and relatively meaning blind until therapeutic tinted lenses at the age of 28. I excelled instead in the undervalued skill of sensing pattern, theme and feel; the System of Sensing.”

For more photos, artwork, and sculpture by Donna Williams (as well as her blog, ebooks, and other writing) go to her web page. You can still get paintings and prints and art cards there. I have one of her original paintings (“Midnight Sea”, a gift from a family member) and a print of another of her paintings (“Sensing”).

At any rate, all of this stuff brings back so many memories.

Notes: