In the labyrinth with Cora Beth Fraser and other attendees at a University College Dublin classical seminar during Autism Month 2024

I ended my previous posting promising further information about what I've been up to during Autism Month 2024 - including concerning a talk I attended by Cora Beth Fraser on autism, classics and labyrinths. Here is this promised information about the talk: as written in my notebook on 24th April and now typed up several days later, while we're still just about in Autism Month, i.e. April.

Labyrinth with Minotaur at the centre on a gem from the Medici Collection in the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. In keeping with the classical tradition, the Minotaur is part-human and part bull and yet, inverting this tradition, it is the top half that is human and the bottom half bull. What this means I am still trying to process. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons here.

Earlier this week [my 24th April self wrote], I zoomed into an online session at University College Dublin by Cora Beth Fraser on autism, classics and labyrinths. Cora stressed the timeliness of her talk as one taking place during Autism Month. She discussed what it means for the Month to have moved from an 'Awareness' to an 'Acceptance' One when creating awareness is still worth doing, not least in academia.

For in academia, Cora Beth suggested, there might be particular numbers of autistic people. And more specifically, she mooted, numbers of neurodivergent people who are also classicists might be especially high.

Why might this be the case?! 

As Cora Beth shared, it's here that the labyrinth image comes in. It comes in for a range of reasons, including the mythological significance of Asterion, the Minotaur, and the relevance of the labyrinth as an image of autism. For as some (neurodivergent?) people might see it, the labyrinth evokes somewhere an autistic person is shut away - for their own protection and/or the protection of others. But then there is the image of the labyrinth as evoking autistic ways of being and of negotiating the world. Looked at in this way, the labyrinth is not so much a prison as somewhere reassuring - somewhere that is, for example, full of corners to shelter behind.

Cora Beth brought in the relevance of this way of seeing the labyrinth and its original inhabitant, the Minotaur, to the 'autistic headcanon'. This is a game where neurodivergent people share how they see themselves in particular characters from myth, fantasy or literature more broadly. Cora Beth proposed the Minotaur as one such character. The fit with what I have been trying to do with Hercules, and what I plan to try with Medusa, is exciting, and Cora Beth said nice things about the part of my book where I propose this.

How Cora Beth conducted the talk - in dialogue with attendees via the zoom chat - was amazing. I have said before that one thing that I welcomed during Lockdown was the opportunity zoom chat provided to keep me feeling connected. It also let me deal with the anxiety of being in a talk yet remote from it. Plus it allowed for sharing ideas. 

It still does... 

This time, the sense of communality that was created led me to ask - playfully, but with seriousness behind it - whether we could all meet every week to talk labyrinths etc.

More soon on the talk (I've only scratched at the surface of what Cora Beth said) and related things...