pi & anne

After my interview on the blog of The Haiku Foundation a question reached me about how being disabled has influenced my art (in particular haiku) or enters into my art. This is a tough question. It is also a very good question.

Because everything I write, the way I act, the way I think is influenced by the fact that I am disabled.
But it needs some explanation about the nature of my disability, or it might not be understandable. This is the tough part.

My disability is invisible to the outside. I had a nervous breakdown ten years ago, and before that I had self-medicated with coffee. Lots of coffee. I didn’t understand why I was so exhausted, so unhappy, so heavy, so scared. I was never the same after that breakdown. In the course of a year I lost a great deal of my abilities to organise and focus. I was overwhelmed by existing. I wanted to die. I felt a permanent wave of emotional pain crushing over me. It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense. I felt lost.

I needed years to understand how I had bottled this up over decades. Later I got diagnosed with major depression, complex posttraumatic stress disorder and several dissociative disorders. I got to know sides of myself which were completely alien to me. I started to distrust my every move. I grieved extensively and I still do, it’s coming and going. I have just a certain amount of energy per day, and I need to be cautious to not overdo it. Otherwise I will experience physical and emotional numbness, get overwhelmed and confused, will search for words, drown in emotional puddles. My triggers are connected with social interaction, so I am very conscious about how I interact and with whom I choose to.

Art in general is an outlet and a way of expressing myself. I struggle without.

By writing I am able to sort my thoughts and also to come back to them. Writing is essential for being able to understand what I am feeling. I had to learn to be patient, everything needs more time, and sometimes only time offers a relief and change. Writing slows me down, in a good way. So how has that influenced my art? In my bio on my site you can read that I’m exploring the filters we humans all have and how it changes the way we perceive our surrounding and by this how we treat it, how we react, how we approach happenings, other people and ourselves. I do have several, even contradicting filters that influence my perception of the world. I believe we all have them. It is an essential truth, and it requires a lot of selfawareness to notice our own.

So when I started to discover haiku, I was exhilarated! Here is an art form which asks to be precise, to use few words which have to be heavy, laden with meaning. I can also befriend limitations with its help and find anyway space and wideness within. It asks for precision and insight, and while emotion should be awakened by it, it is not cut from the world or seen as separate, but connected with what happens around us.

Perception, precision, insight. Love love love that about haiku.

These few words in a haiku are meant to be just enough (to understand) (to feel) (to find) (to reflect) (to be) (to be me…?). I never see that what I observe detached from me, I am aware that me as an observer will always have some kind of influence on it. So why not make this visible and talk about it? It is natural. It is good to recognise our filters and to get to know those of other people, so we can learn from each other.

We are no longer strangers then. We are fellow learners.

One step further are haibun and tanka for me. While the extreme shortness of a haiku works like a lens zooming more and more in (insight! selfawareness!), sometimes we need to look out for the context and nuances. With added prose I have the space to unfold complexities. With tanka I have the space to actively voice my insight.

There is so much beauty in these forms and possibilities galore.

To extend this: I believe that what needs to be expressed also asks for a shape and form which matches its aim. You cannot put a bouquet of flowers into tights, add water and hope for the best, doesn’t work. It might not work out to write about being sad and use a limerick for it. I believe all art is there because of an inner need, and therefore every kind of art is valuable and as worthy as any other, so for me it is more a matter of “How do I feel today? What is important to express? How can I express it best?” And that is what counts, and what makes me happy. This is why I love to learn, learn, learn. More options to stay true to what needs to be expressed!

You can expand this on haiku as an art form as a whole… let’s go a bit meta. When you acknowledge you have your own personal filters and patterns of how to interpret things, this also happens in the way we approach haiku. Are we unconsciously searching a form with clearly defined rules to lean on to, a steady ground? Because it makes us feel secure? We will try to define it more and more and be rather oblivious to the fact that haiku has a long history and shows a lot of variety and also different styles over the centuries and last decades. One might even ignore that culture, vocabulary and language change over time, which will inevitably come to be. I can reproduce art styles of the middle age if I choose to do so. I can let me inspire by it, and create something on its grounds. These are two different approaches.

There is no judgement in this, unless we start to deny what injects our way of thinking and feeling. I believe it is essential for being human, a singular person aware of themself as singular and also embedded in a companionship of humans. Sometimes we might doubt anything else is really real, but even this is something we all share with each other.

We need to trust there are multiple approaches in this world possible which not necessarily declare the other to be wrong. It depends on our filters and why they are there.

Art is like a river, it remains a river, it has a well, it flows into the ocean, and here where you are standing it looks as if it is the same, but it isn’t. It adapts to its surrounding. It will rise with the rain and flood the land. It will carry other particles. It will dig deeper.

Art is a need. I need it. We need it. The world needs it. All that I am is in the way I create and all that I create is a part of me. My disability means I cannot forget about what I am not able to do, it needs my constant skills of finding (new) (old) ways around or/and acceptance. I cannot cut that from my life. It is one of my filters.

I feel like I could add more to this, another time. Maybe I will. Thanks so much for reading.