Disability Arts Online

North begins to whisper and sing to me at this time of year. It is a powerful influence on my work, but defies adequate expression.

I don’t often try to research or explain this longing to travel north in winter and south in summer; I think of myself as a migratory being with an inverted compass, and I’d like to find a unique way to express it.

Years ago a reference to Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” set me seeking and finding authors and poets who were trying to express the journey in out of the ordinary ways. I explored James Joyce because I too had experimented with creating my own language from a concoction of languages and emotional utterances. I doubt this made communicating any easier

And I came full circle with an article about the Danish author HC Branner’s efforts to depict the preverbal and non-verbal, with the claim that authors can become mediums for an inner or higher linguistic reality.

The uniqueness of the telling creates the emotion, reveals and becomes the journey; last autumn I began working with the words.
This year my seasonal migration instinct feels dulled by the equally primitive instinct to hide. Under threat, under pressure in these turbulent times, I feel like I’m heading downwards on a Maslow triangle; clutching the basics in my personal “hierarchy of needs.

My uniqueness becomes a burden when I try to hide. I can only be bold and attempt to share it. I have no desire to be integrated, which I see as the antithesis of artistic, and I am proud of making Disability Arts

But right now I am visually perplexed. Perhaps the current climate is dulling my creativity? Perhaps the need to travel north is something that can only be expressed by doing it? I think I need to be looking back up at the top of my triangle.