A man may be very ‘low’ intellectually—unable to put a key to a door, much less understand the Newtonian laws of motion, wholly unable to comprehend the world as concepts, and yet fully able, and indeed gifted, in understanding the world as concrete-ness, as symbols. This is the other side, the almost sublime other side, of the singular creatures, the gifted simpletons, Martin, Jose, and the Twins.
Yet, it may be said, they are extraordinary and atypical. I therefore start this final section with Rebecca, a wholly ‘unremarkable’ young woman, a simpleton, with whom I worked twelve years ago. I remember her warmly.
21. Rebecca
Rebecca was no child when she was referred to our clinic. She was nineteen, but, as her grandmother said, ‘just like a child in some ways’. She could not find her way around the block, she could not confidently open a door with a key (she could never ‘see’ how the key went, and never seemed to learn). She had left/ right confusion, she sometimes put on her clothes the wrong way— inside out, back-to-front, without appearing to notice, or, if she noticed, without being able to get them right. She might spend hours jamming a hand or foot into the wrong glove or shoe—she seemed, as her grandmother said, to have ‘no sense of space’. She was clumsy and ill-coordinated in all her movements—a ‘klutz’, one report said, a ‘motor moron’ another (although when she danced, all her clumsiness disappeared).
Rebecca had a partial cleft palate, which caused a whistling in her speech; short, stumpy fingers, with blunt, deformed nails; and a high, degenerative myopia requiring very thick spectacles—all stigmata of the same congenital condition which had caused her cerebral and mental defects. She was painfully shy and withdrawn, feeling that she was, and had always been, a ‘figure of fun’.
But she was capable of warm, deep, even passionate attachments. She had a deep love for her grandmother, who had brought her up since she was three (when she was orphaned by the death of both parents). She was very fond of nature, and, if she was taken to the city parks and botanic gardens, spent many happy hours there. She was very fond too of stories, though she never learned to read (despite assiduous, and even frantic, attempts), and would implore her grandmother or others to read to her. ‘She has a hunger for stories,’ her grandmother said; and fortunately her grandmother loved reading stories and had a fine reading voice which kept Rebecca entranced. And not just stories—poetry too. This seemed a deep need or hunger in Rebecca—a necessary form of nourishment, of reality, for her mind. Nature was beautiful, but mute. It was not enough. She needed the world re-presented to her in verbal images, in language, and seemed to have little difficulty following the metaphors and symbols of even quite deep poems, in striking contrast to her incapacity with simple propositions and instructions. The language of feeling, of the concrete, of image and symbol, formed a world she loved and, to a remarkable extent, could enter. Though conceptually (and ‘proposition-ally’) inept, she was at home with poetic language, and was herself, in a stumbling, touching way, a sort of ‘primitive’, natural poet. Metaphors, figures of speech, rather striking similitudes, would come naturally to her, though unpredictably, as sudden poetic ejaculations or allusions. Her grandmother was devout, in a quiet way, and this also was true of Rebecca: she loved the lighting of the Sabbath candles, the benisons and orisons which thread the Jewish day; she loved going to the synagogue, where she too was loved (and seen as a child of God, a sort of innocent, a holy fool); and she fully understood the liturgy, the chants, the prayers, rites and symbols of which the Orthodox service consists. All this was possible for her, accessible to her, loved by her, despite gross perceptual and spatio-temporal problems, and gross impairments in every schematic capacity—she could not count change, the simplest calculations defeated her, she could never learn to read or write, and she would average 60 or less in IQ tests (though doing notably better on the verbal than the performance parts of the test). Thus she was a ‘moron’, a ‘fool’, a ‘booby’, or had so appeared, and so been called, throughout her whole life, but one with an unexpected, strangely moving, poetic power. Superficially she was a mass of handicaps and incapacities, with the intense frustrations and anxieties attendant on these; at this level she was, and felt herself to be, a mental cripple—beneath the effortless skills, the happy capacities, of others; but at some deeper level there was no sense of handicap or incapacity, but a feeling of calm and completeness, of being fully alive, of being a soul, deep and high, and equal to all others. Intellectually, then, Rebecca felt a cripple; spiritually she felt herself a full and complete being.
When I first saw her—clumsy, uncouth, all-of-a-fumble—I saw her merely, or wholly, as a casualty, a broken creature, whose neurological impairments I could pick out and dissect with precision: a multitude of apraxias and agnosias, a mass of sensorimotor impairments and breakdowns, limitations of intellectual schemata and concepts similar (by Piaget’s criteria) to those of a child of eight. A poor thing, I said to myself, with perhaps a ‘splinter skill’, a freak gift, of speech; a mere mosaic of higher cortical functions, Piagetian schemata—most impaired.
The next time I saw her, it was all very different. I didn’t have her in a test situation, ‘evaluating’ her in a clinic. I wandered outside—it was a lovely spring day—with a few minutes in hand before the clinic started, and there I saw Rebecca sitting on a bench, gazing at the April foliage quietly, with obvious delight. Her posture had none of the clumsiness which had so impressed me before. Sitting there, in a light dress, her face calm and slightly smiling, she suddenly brought to mind one of Chekov’s young women—Irene, Anya, Sonya, Nina—seen against the backdrop of a Chekovian cherry orchard. She could have been any young woman enjoying a beautiful spring day. This was my human, as opposed to my neurological, vision.
As I approached, she heard my footsteps and turned, gave me a broad smile, and wordlessly gestured. ‘Look at the world,’ she seemed to say. ‘How beautiful it is.’ And then there came out, in Jacksonian spurts, odd, sudden, poetic ejaculations: ‘spring’, ‘birth’, ‘growing’, ‘stirring’, ‘coming to life’, ‘seasons’, ‘everything in its time’. I found myself thinking of Ecclesiastes: ‘To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time . . .’ This was what Rebecca, in her disjointed fashion, was ejaculating—a vision of seasons, of times, like that of the Preacher. ‘She is an idiot Ecclesiastes,’ I said to myself. And in this phrase, my two visions of her—as idiot and as symbolist—met, collided and fused. She had done appallingly in the testing—which, in a sense, was designed, like all neurological and psychological testing, not merely to uncover, to bring out deficits, but to decompose her into functions and deficits. She had come apart, horribly, in formal testing, but now she was mysteriously ‘together’ and composed.
Why was she so decomposed before, how could she be so re-composed now? I had the strongest feeling of two wholly different modes of thought, or of organisation, or of being. The first schematic—pattern-seeing, problem-solving—this is what had been tested, and where she had been found so defective, so disastrously wanting. But the tests had given no inkling of anything but the deficits, of anything, so to speak, beyond her deficits.