It is clear that both—like the Twins (see the next chapter)— could be pushed, or drawn, into the sort of mechanical feats considered typical of ‘idiot savants’—feats at once prodigious and meaningless; but that both also (like the Twins), when not pushed or drawn in this fashion, showed a consistent seeking after beauty and order. Though Martin has an amazing memory for random, meaningless facts, his real pleasure comes from order and coherence, whether it be the musical and spiritual order of a cantata, or the encyclopedic order of Grove. Both Bach and Grove communicate a world. Martin, indeed, has no world but music—as is the case with Viscott’s patient—but this world is a real world), makes him real, can transform him. This is marvellous to see with Martin—and it was evidently no less so with Harriet G:
This ungainly, awkward, inelegant lady, this overgrown five-year-old, became absolutely transformed when I asked her to perform for a seminar at Boston State Hospital. She sat down demurely, stared quietly at the keyboard until we all grew silent, and brought her hands slowly to the keyboard and let them rest a moment. Then she nodded her head and began to play with all the feeling and movement of a concert performer. From that moment she was another person.
One speaks of ‘idiot savants’ as if they had an odd ‘knack’ or talent of a mechanical sort, with no real intelligence or understanding. This, indeed, was what I first thought with Martin—and continued to think until I brought in the Magnificat. Only then did it finally become clear to me that Martin could grasp the full complexity of such a work, and that it was not just a knack, or a remarkable rote memory at work, but a genuine and powerful musical intelligence. I was particularly interested, therefore, after this book was first published, to receive a fascinating article by L. K. Miller of Chicago entitled “Sensitivity to Tonal Structure in a Developmentally Disabled Musical Savant” (presented at the Psychonomics Society, Boston, November 1985; currently in press). Meticulous study of this five-year-old prodigy, with severe mental and other handicaps due to maternal rubella, showed not rote memory of a mechanical sort, but ‘. . . impressive sensitivity to the rules governing composition, particularly the role of different notes in determining (diatonic) key-structure . . . (implying) implicit knowledge of structural rules in a generative sense: that is, rules not limited to the specific examples provided by one’s experience.’ This, I am convinced, is the case with Martin, too— and one must wonder whether it may not be true of all ‘idiot savants’: that they may be truly and creatively intelligent, and not just have a mechanical ‘knack’, in the specific realms—musical, numerical, visual, whatever—in which they excel. It is the intelligence of a Martin, a Jose, the Twins, albeit in a special and narrow area, that finally forces itself on one; and it is this intelligence that must be recognised and nurtured.
23. The Twins
When I first met the twins, John and Michael, in 1966 in a state hospital, they were already well known. They had been on radio and television, and made the subject of detailed scientific and popular reports.[21] They had even, I suspected, found their way into science fiction, a little ‘fictionalised’, but essentially as portrayed in the accounts that had been published. +
The twins, who were then twenty-six years old, had been in institutions since the age of seven, variously diagnosed as autistic, psychotic or severely retarded. Most of the accounts concluded that, as idiots savants go, there was ‘nothing much to them’— except for their remarkable ‘documentary’ memories of the tiniest visual details of their own experience, and their use of an unconscious, calendrical algorithm that enabled them to say at once on what day of the week a date far in the past or future would fall. This is the view taken by Steven Smith, in his comprehensive and imaginative book, The Great Mental Calculators (1983). There have been, to my knowledge, no further studies of the twins since the mid-Sixties, the brief interest they aroused being quenched by the apparent ‘solution’ of the problems they presented.
But this, I believe, is a misapprehension, perhaps a natural enough one in view of the stereotyped approach, the fixed format of questions, the concentration on one ‘task’ or another, with which the original investigators approached the twins, and by which they reduced them—their psychology, their methods, their lives—almost to nothing.
The reality is far stranger, far more complex, far less explicable, than any of these studies suggest, but it is not even to be glimpsed by aggressive formal ‘testing’, or the usual 60 Minutes-like interviewing of the twins.
Not that any of these studies, or TV performances, is ‘wrong’. They are quite reasonable, often informative, as far as they go, but they confine themselves to the obvious and testable ‘surface,’ and do not go to the depths—do not even hint, or perhaps guess, that there are depths below.
One indeed gets no hint of any depths unless one ceases to test the twins, to regard them as ‘subjects’. One must lay aside the urge to limit and test, and get to know the twins—observe them, openly, quietly, without presuppositions, but with a full and sympathetic phenomenological openness, as they live and think and interact quietly, pursuing their own lives, spontaneously, in their singular way. Then one finds there is something exceedingly mysterious at work, powers and depths of a perhaps fundamental sort, which I have not been able to ‘solve’ in the eighteen years that I have known them.
They are, indeed, unprepossessing at first encounter—a sort of grotesque Tweedledum and Tweedledee, indistinguishable, mirror images, identical in face, in body movements, in personality, in mind, identical too in their stigmata of brain and tissue damage. They are undersized, with disturbing disproportions in head and hands, high-arched palates, high-arched feet, monotonous squeaky voices, a variety of peculiar tics and mannerisms, and a very high, degenerative myopia, requiring glasses so thick that their eyes seem distorted, giving them the appearance of absurd little professors, peering and pointing, with a misplaced, obsessed, and absurd concentration. And this impression is fortified as soon as one quizzes them—or allows them, as they are apt to do, like pantomime puppets, to start spontaneously on one of their ‘routines’.
This is the picture that has been presented in published articles, and on stage—they tend to be ‘featured’ in the annual show in the hospital I work in—and in their not infrequent, and rather embarrassing, appearances on TV.
The ‘facts’, under these circumstances, are established to monotony. The twins say, ‘Give us a date—any time in the last or next forty thousand years.’ You give them a date, and, almost instantly, they tell you what day of the week it would be. ‘Another date!’ they cry, and the performance is repeated. They will also tell you the date of Easter during the same period of 80,000 years. One may observe, though this is not usually mentioned in the reports, that their eyes move and fix in a peculiar way as they do this—as if they were unrolling, or scrutinising, an inner landscape, a mental calendar. They have the look of ‘seeing’, of intense visualisation, although it has been concluded that what is involved is pure calculation.