When you advance in age, if need arises, you may rely a) on friends b) on relatives c) on institutional agencies, where they exist (NHS and the likes). You may have no real friends, people who would worry for your stance if you told them you are in need. You may have no relatives because they all died or live so far away that you haven’t seen them for the last 20 years. You may ask for help to some institutional agency. But what do agencies know of autistic people? I am not talking about me. I am inured to loneliness, I rarely panic (sometimes it happens). But there are huge unanswered problems about lonely autistic people that I would like to start scanning. That was the idea here.
But it’s not only about age. It’s also or even more a matter of what is the meaning of life on the edge. Intellectual sophistication is a great advantage for people who enjoy it. But isn’t it a privilege, a class privilege? Do all people have the chance to take refuge in a book, in quality media, in the Web? Even for married people and people who have children, their reliance on them should not be a mechanically gained right. With kinship comes assistance; but communication, sharing of experience?
A latino-american young woman comes 5 days a week to clean up my flat. She has been in the country six years and has learned well the language. I could understand her even if she spoke Spanish. She was an elementary teacher in her country before fleeing from her family. She is rather articulate and, being alone, except for a sister with whom she only fights, she talks abundantly about all her problems, her unhappiness, her little dog (she got the dog to satisfy her maternity needs and she is much happier with this little cub). On the whole the quality of her life is not so bad. But what next for her? She is dangerously sliding towards obesity and very unhappy about that. She had a Moroccan boyfriend for two years, but broke up with him. She has this Pekinese and she will probably remain alone. Alone, no family back in his homeland. She meets here with her fellow expatriates (the are a thousand in this city). She has no problems of communication, but yet it’s not easy to gain a foothold in a foreign city starting from scratch.
She doesn’t read books, sees only some action movie and some DVDs I lend her. It’s difficult to find movies she may like to see that are not commercial garbage.
I can’t imagine what will be of her in 20 years. I must confess that, with physical deterioration behind the corner and loneliness, she has not many good cards to play for her future.
While I have much to complain about my life, I know these two lives (mine and hers) are so different. Moreover there is an awkward asymmetry. in that she narrates so much of herself and there is little I can narrate to her about my life.
Unhappy as I may have been and be, one is attached to his own life and I wouldn’t make swaps.
But besides this, also because I like her a little and she is the only human I see apart from the theatre’s cashiers, I have an acute feeling of what privilege means, if anything in the matter of handling cultural tools which may help me to survive, like prayers.
Edited 2.27
I probably was worrying too much in fit of gloom. Anyhow this idea of culture as a form of prayer and of relating rather as form of snobbish privilege where to to nourish selfcomplacency
and a sort of elitarian insulation is a serious thing for me.
24 Feb 2007, 3:36 pm
