Natasha Burge’s writing on autistic psychogeography:
I tell her about skoliogeography, my new secret something. Skolio, from the Greek word for twisted, and geography, meaning earth writing, a crooked psychogeography for the weird 1%, drifting away away away from the center. It rings truer.
She suggests I write about the development of this theory, this crooked psychogeography. She wants to know how it came to be. Trajectories, she mentions, timelines, something linear and accumulating.
But it is not a theory, I explain, but a deviation that insists on our surreal right to seek the marvelous, indeed, even the miraculous, in the mundane. Wherever I position myself, I say to her, there is a temporary autonomous zone where neurodivergence prevails, an insertion of alterity that can, inshallah, generate ripples of slantways thinking, disruptive, quixotic.
We are told we must articulate elaborate schemas, but I tell her there is something to be said for the stubborn insistence of simply being who you are, where you are. And then, from my skull, I pull out a tuft of cloud, limned and yielding, and I present it to her.
Burge, Natasha (2021) ‘Excerpt from Drifts’ The Common, 9th September (URL: https://www.thecommononline.org/excerpt-from-drifts/, accessed 18.08.26) [[link:: https://www.thecommononline.org/excerpt-from-drifts/]]
[[The Condition of Having No Category]]
[[A Mosaic or Field Approach]]