Stimming as prayer
An autistic perspective on "quiet expressiveness" at the root of artmaking
Stimming is self stimulation in the form of repetitive actions or motions which involve one or more of the senses. Spinning, rocking, repetitive hand gestures and the repetition of words are all behaviors which are known by autistics as stims. The most powerful stims for me are visual. I find the rippling movement of light across the surface of the water to be hypnotic. It creates a strong feeling of peace in my mindbody, centering me completely in the present moment. Perhaps I could even call this a state of safety. It is difficult for me to tear my attention away from moments of comfort like this when I am interrupted, but within the dominant culture, states of prayer can be difficult to recognize outside of the frame of a place of worship.
My first experience of prayer intertwined with the heat and light of the afternoon moving in dappled waves across my face. As a child, it did not occur to me that prayer would be a place to ask for things or to speak about fears or troubles, it was simply a buzzing recollection that I had everything I needed in that moment and was connected with everything that had been or would be. These were moments looking out from the window of the school bus or on the playground where the experience of myself as a singular body or mind dissolved, leaving only the quivering air rising from the blacktop. I have known that I am a spirit having a physical experience for a long time.
The adults in my life thought I was a quiet child, but I appreciate Quashie’s understanding of prayer as a form of “quiet expressiveness” which exists within the realm of the figurative and the poetic. I believe it is my early experiences with prayer which prepared me to be an artist - to begin by writing poems and to continue on by sculpting and performing poetry in motion. Stimming was/is a doorway to the Divine for me and created a blueprint of a feeling of being connected to a creative source without the presence of my ego in the way. From an autistic perspective, the swaying of the church choir is a stim, the rocking of Jewish prayer at the Wailing Wall is a stim, the vision of thousands of individual bodies performing Tawaf, counterclockwise around al-Ka'ba al-Musharrafa is undoubtedly a visual stim.
Intuitively, it makes sense to me how whole histories of art would be birthed from ongoing collective stimming practices. I believe this is the magic of prayer that Quashie speaks of - the “ability to make something happen” is synonymous for me with the ability to make art happen. Beyond the achievement of our short lived desires is “an understanding which exists beneath and beyond what is conscious” which points to something bigger than our individual asks. It is here where I rejoice.