Barcelona in a Bag

Oh yes – I’ve been up t’Grantium portal
Oh yes – I’ve been up there again
Oh yes – I’ve been up t’Grantium portal
And now I have got portal brain

Bring back, oh bring back,
Oh bring back my bra-in to me to me…

For those who don’t know, the Grantium GFTA portal consists of many forms. They are slit shaped boxes – much like the mouth of a letter box. These slits allow for a couple of sentences to be visible at a time before you must scroll up or down to view preceding or following sentences. I’ve used online forms were the boxes expand as you fill them in affording a complete view of what is (or if cutting and pasting from another document) what has been written.

But the Grantium form is not like that. The form boxes are rigid. So imagine this.

You have diagnosed difficulties in the areas of short term and working memory. For such of us – out of sight can easily be out of mind. If you can’t see it you can’t remember what it says, where it goes in a sequence, or how it flows.

Personally I find that one piece of new information will immediately replace another – so that a new sentence can push the previous sentence out of my mind unless I can see the whole, and grasp how they run together. Even with a whole document this makes reading, writing and processing information laborious because you have to repeat each task involved many times, and go over your sentences again and again to hold onto meaning and coherence. This is down to short and working memory being aspects of brain function which are vital in retaining, retrieving and manipulating information.

The letter box shaped forms are a serious problem with the portal template. The design is not easily accessible at all.

I’d like to make the wheelchair analogy if possible (I find it is often handy with invisible disabilities to do this) but i’m not sure I can. These rigid portal forms are like a pavement that is too high or a sudden fight of steps, for which you need a ramp to access. Okay – good access consists of permanent structures in place at point of access like concrete ramps (or those built in as an option – the folding ramp on some buses which are driver operated, for example).

Access support is available for the portal in the form of paid help to fill in your form if you have a disability which impacts on writing in any way. This is great. It really is.

But you have to know it exists, navigate a process to get it (phone call, email, phone call) and organise it for yourself.

I’m not sure what this means in ramp terms, and even with the support I still find myself up the portal because the form is highly complex and has to be correct in every detail – it needs checking and checking again.

So another phrase coined.

Scroll ‘n squint – the actions required to fill in and edit your answers to the questions asked in the letter box forms.

You put your lap top on
Do your portal log-in
Scroll
Squint
Put the hours in
Do the up ‘n down.
Do the save and save.
Careful you don’t time out!

Oh no, it’s gone and timed out!
Oh no, it’s gone and timed out!
Oh no, it’s gone and timed out!
Round and round we go!

(Loop)

The Grantium portal is currently supported by a brilliant helpline and additional access support if needed. This does help, but (as I’ve argued before) accessing the access is not a given for many autistic and ND (neurodivergent) artists. Expanding form boxes seem like a fair ask from where I’m standing, but it’s the tip of the iceberg for accessibility where neuro-divergence and invisible disabilities are concerned. We truly need a variety of means with which to submit our ideas for funding. We have a variety of brains so that would be a great access idea.

Thank you.

I’m working on a funding proposal which means I’m online a LOT. Application is online, I also need to liaise with my collaborator – and then there is pinball brain. The brain I’ve written about before.

And so I click.

And so I see, and see. I read and read. Acres of online print – the Tweets, the links, the lot. I’ve used up my free reads on The Nation and the New York Times, I’m following dozens of US journalists. My need to keep up is voracious.

I question my motives. Is this obsession. Yes. But it is also work for me.

I am understanding at first hand what fascism looks like and how it grows. It’s a crash course in this digital age, and the unresolved hows and whys of European history in the 1930s and 40s are suddenly revealed.

A generation is waking up though we don’t sleep. We’re getting it.

And as I click I see also that resistance is rising. My work is a vigil – like all my other vigils. I am watching. Waiting for justice.

As an artist I do what I can. I march. I make. I write and publish these thoughts.

My laptop and my studio form the sites of my resistance.

Yesterday I made a start with some sketches on improvised boards.

Today I bought 12 canvases for a new installation to be shown in May. I have my work cut out to produce a series which will be called Landscapes of Resistance.

It may not seem much. But it’s all I have.

An a-n professional development bursary opportunity. I hesitate.

The form is easy – no Grantium this! It is beautifully clear and the text boxes open up as you fill them in. So there’s no rigid and obfuscating letter box slit format to squint at (demanding scroll, scroll to see sentences and meaning unfold or in some cases unravel). And we are talking words – not characters. It is short and doable. Amen.

But still – there is something about it I don’t understand. Like looking at a swimming pool with a view to jumping in when you can’t judge the depth and have never swum a stroke in your life.

A familiar sensation for an autistic person I think, and there should be a phrase for this. To draw a blank? Too commonplace. Vertiginous? Accurate but dealing only with effect.

A phrase conjuring the absence of something would be better. Words for when you can’t visualise something. When there is no mental image, no equivalent to draw on, no reference point. It’s a little dreamlike. The sensation that your reality has become subverted, or faintly absurd. Everything indicates that it should be obvious but it just isn’t.

We seem to be in the area of no, mental template available! I imagine this phrase spoken in a robotic voice like the one which blurts, unexpected item in baggage area, at the M&S self service checkout.

Somehow there is no map, no compass, and certainly no GPS. But there never is for the autistic person when dealing with hidden assumptions.

This translates as point of no entry. The door is not so much locked as missing.

All my life I have experienced this without knowing it had a name, or that the name was autism – or rather the effects of neuro-normative cultures on the autistic mind. It is the most usual sensation to find a no entry sign slapped on opportunity, from the most mundane to the highest forms. This is about a wider lack of fit and not a specific criticism of what is an excellent pro-forma in itself.

I’m simply unable to read the hidden social text embedded within most neuro-normative forms. Socially embedded codes are so very pervasive that the predominant neuro-culture is blind to their bias’.

The autistic mind is sometimes described as concrete and literal. I feel this is quite mistaken. It is simply that (in my case at least) I have to see and feel something to understand and gain knowledge, either this or to have had an equivalent experience to draw a parallel. Direct sources of information are best – drawing parallels is what we have to do so often but can be seriously hit and miss. A best guess on imperfect information.

One of the hardest things is knowing what’s expected when it isn’t spelt out. Professional development is assumed as a common term – when the neuro-normative versions of this are socially embedded and likely to be quite alien (to an autistic person).

The assumption is one of shared values and experiences so that it can be taken as read what is meant by professional development. But an autistic person is unlikely to intuit what this feels and looks like from a neuro-normative perspective without prior knowledge.

An autistic person really needs to be informed about what this covers, as they would almost certainly come at this question from an entirely different perspective.

Professional development as a concept in an art context needs to be broken down into its component parts if we’re to level the playing field for autistic artists. For this we need to unpick and then move beyond neuro-normative cultural assumptions and begin a conversation about professional development autism style.

In this instance I think a good place to start would be a far more comprehensive bullet point list of what can and can’t be covered by the a-n bursaries. Such a list would be nothing short of a ramp.

For my part I got lucky and found kindness and a translator. Twitter can be very useful. I still don’t know if I’m filling the form in right, but at least I’m having a go.

In general terms it needs to be acknowledged that access goes beyond the template itself (and this one is so good) to deeper issues of pervasive social bias for which autistic artists need additional support.

John Berger died at 90 yesterday.

What can I possibly say of interest or relevance to add to the acres of words which will be written about him and his influence on his passing?

Exactly, so I won’t try.

Except to add an autistic perspective.

I first met John Berger in 1980, on a compulsory reading list for a degree in history of art. And I still have my copy of Ways of Seeing, which I bought in the tiny (on campus) Sussex University bookshop. Back in the day of free education at University level. My campus rent was £12 a week all in, and no tuition fees to be paid. The maintenance element of the grant was means tested, with a parental contribution exacted or not depending on income. End of.

John Berger was that rare and exciting thing. An artist writer.

I was decades away from knowing that I am autistic and also dyslexic/ dyscalculic.

Things I knew back then:

There were so very many perilous authors with a penchant for specialist language (the incomprehensible). Elitists! We raged – as a student group we were (I remember) angry young things.

That I was inexplicably and painfully shy in circumstances others navigated with confidence (this felt deeply mysterious and yet somehow inevitable and entirely my fault).

That I had an unreliable brain (on-off, there and not there).

My main job was to camouflage the oceanic scale of my perplexity – but this was (I believed) because I was an utter fake. A stupid person who had faked my way to university. I had to admit it was odd but autism as an idea for myself would be light years away.

When it came to visual culture I was less stupid it seemed. But still it was uphill in my first year, before I hit my stride. Geekery of course (as now I know it to be) pulled me through.

John Berger somehow cut though all of this. Ways of Seeing wasn’t a breath of fresh air – it was an oxygen mask. He detonated all my previous schooling at A’level, and visually I began from scratch. Yet for me it mattered less how much of what he wrote could be absorbed by the intellect.

The thing to grasp was quite other and better sucked through a straw than read. In drawing back the curtains of cultural assumption Berger also appeared as a magician – signalling alternate layers of perception. Autistic people inhabit liminal spaces it seems to me, often intuitively absorbing their environments. Seeing patterns, which other people can miss. Navigating with an unerring logic.

When I watch Berger now on YouTube I don’t want to claim him as autistic. That’s not what I mean. No way.

It’s just that there’s a certain cross over in the depth of his perceptions. Ha! Ways of seeing and ways of being, if you like.

In a long conversation with Susan Sontag on YouTube (1983) Berger says,

“I’m not very verbal, I have no facility with words.”

Sontag: “I don’t believe you.”

Berger: “It’s true, it’s true.”

And he explains that he’s talking about the unsayable – that which is beyond words, he goes on to insist. Like a melody, or a pattern of colours or a geometric form. And that the struggle is to recreate that in words.

His hyperawareness of the primacy of experience above language (I now realise) chimes in with the autistic condition as I have come to know it (I use the term condition as in state rather than as per medical model).

Words for Berger (he says) must be as close as possible, but they are never close enough to the primary source. They can’t touch the non-verbal, the felt intuitive experience.

And we’re there.

Of course.

This is my realm. I must feel my way. In all senses. The knowable is not always the sayable. We need gestures and babble sometimes – it’s all good. In fact it’s delightful.

What I recognised back then (without knowing it) was validation. From a man entirely connected to the primary sources of experience. A conduit, gifted with the ability to translate visual (and intuitive) perception in it’s highest forms into a language that was crystalline and egalitarian in spirit.

I recently viewed The Art of Looking a documentary about John Berger regaining vision after cataract operations (though it was so much more than this). Spending an hour in his company was to be transported back to this time, when University education was free.

As charismatic as ever at 90, he did that trick again of connecting me to myself and reminding me that there is so much good in the world. For 2016 – that was no mean feat.