Ever since I learned about Cassandra, in college, I’ve identified very strongly with this mythological figure. She was a member of the cursed House of Atreus, and she had an affair with the god Apollo. While he was delighted with her, he gave her the gift of prophecy. But later, in a rage because she had been unfaithful, he had to retaliate. Greek gods weren’t allowed to take back their gifts, but they were allowed to give other gifts that would nullify the orginals. And Apollo, in his rage, had to leave Cassandra with her prophecy gift, but he followed it up with the curse that no one would ever believe her. And so she spoke truth all of her life, and was never believed.

As a person with Asperger’s who has never made the amount of eye contact that neurotypicals seem to require, I’ve been labelled by many, many people over my lifetime as either a liar or a paranoid or a fantasist. After all, people who won’t make enough contact are obviously lying, and may even be nuts. And I, the Aspergian, have lied in my lifetime less than anyone else I’ve ever known, and I haven’t made up untrue stories about people or events, and I haven’t imagined things out of thin air. I’ve been calling myself Cassandra in my thoughts for decades.

Being the homeless bum that I am, living now in a park, I spend a lot of time here in the Turners library to be indoors. Fishing through an old book of early female amerikan poets yesterday,  I found one I’d never heard of before, and whose every poem in the anthology I liked. Here is a particular favorite. 

Cassandra……..      louise bogan

read…  Neverending solitaire 

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Blogging has been yet another form of wandering for me. During the very worst 15 months of my life, I have wandered in many ways, and this on-line journaling is one of them. Different blogs to emphasize different aspects of my story. Blogs written to simply emote, to dump the emotion onto the page so I could carry on with another alien day. And now trying to update all these blogs, to fill in details and explanations that I left out when I was just emoting so I could keep going, keep walking streets, keep hanging around for hours in places I didn’t want to be in.

I have wandered through poetry, my own and other people’s; through languages; through telling small things about my precious, stolen animals; through rage and derision and anxiety and too many unanswered questions. I’ve done nothing but wander in all these ways since the day I lost my own life on 12 March 2008. Wandering in hope for so long that I would get some of my animals back.

But that never happened, and because I’m stuck now in time and breathing that is not anything I would term my own life, I’m likewise stuck with blogging, stuck with writing books online, stuck with filling empty time. I’ve found the blogging folk to be, on the whole, a disappointment in their general lack of manners and lack of interest in anyone but themselves. They’re further disappointing in what it is they’re looking for online. Largely they want to be entertained, and so many of them don’t seem to wish to think. But I am here and I’m stuck with it, because there’s nothing now left of the way I lived my life.

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read…   All my stars

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Silence today, mostly. Certain silences can be golden, which puts me in mind of a Kenneth Patchen Picture Poem.  Some of these creations by Patchen were made into large postcards printed on good, heavy stock that would last for years. That’s how I met the particular one I’m quoting: the postcard version of it was sent to me way back in the 70′s. All through the 80′s and 90′s, wherever I lived, I hung it in the bathroom. My kid grew up with Patchen in the bathrooms for seventeen years. I no longer have the darned thing, and wish I did, so the photo on this page is clip art of white, silent roses who are not human and do not blather. And here’s the wee poem that Patchen painted on his picture long ago:

                                                                 

 I wonder if Patchen had Asperger’s. Certain silences can be golden.

Slán lé na laethe geala, slán le na laethe.

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read…  Scealta liatha

(photo at www.toscano.com) 

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Blogging is something I never had any great desire to do. So much for that. I have now on WordPress alone more blogs than you can shake the proverbial stick at, plus a few other small blogs on other sites. This hyper-blogging came about as the result of events you can read about, if you wish, in one of my other online books: spite and malice. I began the blogging as a way to deal with the state of shock I was in in 2008, and in the hopes that I might find a journalist or a lawyer (or both) to help me. That didn’t happen.

What did happen was prolonged pain and anxiety, prolonged homelessness, and more. The homelessness is finally over, but the pain and grief and loneliness persist. The writing is a small distraction from and a small anesthetic to that pain.

After so much blogging, I asked myself:  Why not online books?  Books it is. Some being written from scratch, but most being pieced together from the many, many blog posts. This particular little book is a patchwork of posts that I like and want to have gathered together as a loose unit.

I don’t know many Finnish words, but of the few I know, there’s one I get a charge out of. Kaikenlainen. The book I found it in said it means “all kinds of things.”  So maybe that’s what you’ll find here: all kinds of things.

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(mask by g.veronese at www.toscano.com)

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.