Now, finally, he started to speak—though ‘speak’ is much too strong a term for the strange-sounding, stumbling, largely unintelligible utterances that came out, on occasion startling him as much as they startled us—for all of us, Jose included, had regarded him as wholly and incorrigibly mute, whether from incapacity, indisposition, or both (there had been the attitude, as well as the fact, of not speaking). And here, too, we found it impossible to say how much was ‘organic’, how much was a matter of ‘motivation’. We had reduced, though not annulled, his temporal-lobe disorders—his electro-encephalograms (EEGs) were never normal; they still showed in these lobes a sort of low-grade electrical muttering, occasional spikes, dysrhythmia, slow waves. But they were immensely improved compared with what they were when he came in. If he could remove their convulsiveness, he could not reverse the damage they had sustained.
We had improved, it could not be doubted, his physiological potentials for speech, though there was an impairment of his abilities to use, understand, and recognise speech, with which, doubtless, he would always have to contend, But, equally important, he now was fighting for the recovery of his understanding and speech (egged on by all of us, and guided by the speech therapist in particular), where previously he had accepted it, hopelessly or masochistically, and indeed had turned against virtually all communication with others, verbal and otherwise. Speech impairment and the refusal to speak had coupled before in the double malignancy of disease; now, recovery of speech and attempts to speak were being happily coupled in the double benignity of beginning to get well. Even to the most sanguine of us it was very apparent that Jose would never speak with any facility approaching normal, that speech could never, for him, be a real vehicle for self-expression, could serve only to express his simpler needs. And he himself seemed to feel this too and, while he continued to fight for speech, turned more fiercely to drawing for self-expression.
One final episode. Jose had been moved off the frenzied admission ward to a calmer, quieter special ward, more homelike, less prisonlike, than the rest of the hospitaclass="underline" a ward with an exceptional number and quality of staff, designed especially, as Bettelheim would say, as ‘a home for the heart’, for patients with autism who seem to require a kind of loving and dedicated attention that few hospitals can give. When I went up to this new ward, he waved his hand lustily as soon as he saw me—an outgoing, open gesture. I could not imagine him having done this before. He pointed to the locked door, he wanted it open, he wanted to go outside.
He led the way downstairs, outside, into the overgrown, sunlit garden. So far as I could learn, he had not, voluntarily, gone outside since he was eight, since the very start of his illness and withdrawal. Nor did I have to offer him a pen—he took one himself. We walked around the hospital grounds, Jose sometimes gazing at the sky and trees, but more often down at his feet, at the mauve and yellow carpet of clover and dandelions beneath us. He had a very quick eye for plant forms and colours, rapidly saw and picked a rare white clover, and found a still rarer four-leaved one. He found seven different types of grass, no less, seemed to recognise, to greet, each one as a friend. He was delighted most of all by the great yellow dandelions, open, all their florets flung open to the sun. This was his plant—it was how he felt, and to show his feeling he would draw it. The need to draw, to pay graphic reverence, was immediate and strong: he knelt down, placed his clipboard on the ground, and, holding the dandelion, drew it.
This, I think, is the first drawing from real life that Jose had done since his father took him sketching as a child, before he became ill. It is a splendid drawing, accurate and alive. It shows his love for reality, for another form of life. It is, to my mind, rather similar to, and not inferior to, the fine vivid flowers one finds in medieval botanies and herbals—fastidiously, botanically exact, even though Jose has no formal knowledge of botany, and could not be taught it or understand it if he tried. His mind is not built for the abstract, the conceptual. That is not available to him as a path to truth. But he has a passion and a real power for the particular—he loves it, he enters into it, he re-creates it. And the particular, if one is particular enough, is also a road—one might say nature’s road—to reality and truth.
The abstract, the categorical, has no interest for the autistic person—the concrete, the particular, the singular, is all. Whether this is a question of capacity or disposition, it is strikingly the case. Lacking, or indisposed to, the general, the autistic seem to compose their world picture entirely of particulars. Thus they live, not in a universe, but in what William James called a ‘multiverse’, of innumerable, exact, and passionately intense particulars. It is a mode of mind at the opposite extreme from the generalising, the scientific, but still ‘real’, equally real, in a quite different way. Such a mind has been imagined in Borges’s story ‘Tunes the Memorious’ (so like Luria’s Mnemonist):
He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort ... In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence . . . No one . . . has felt the heat and pressure of a reality as indefatigable as that which day and night converged upon the hapless Ireneo.
As for Borges’s Ireneo, so for Jose. But it is not necessarily a hapless circumstance: there may be a deep satisfaction in particulars, especially if they shine, as they may do for Jose, with an emblematic radiance.
I think Jose, an autist, a simpleton too, has such a gift for the concrete, for form, that he is, in his way, a naturalist and natural artist. He grasps the world as forms—directly and intensely felt forms—and reproduces them. He has fine literal powers, but he has figurative powers too. He can draw a flower or fish with remarkable accuracy, but he can also make one which is a personification, an emblem, a dream, or a joke. And the autistic are supposed to lack imagination, playfulness, art!
Creatures like Jose are not supposed to exist. Autistic child-artists like ‘Nadia’ were not supposed to exist. Are they indeed so rare, or are they overlooked? Nigel Dennis, in a brilliant essay on Nadia in the New York Review of Books (4 May 1978), wonders how many of the world’s ‘Nadias’ may be dismissed or overlooked, their remarkable productions crumpled up and consigned to the trash can, or simply, like Jose, treated without thought, as an odd talent, isolated, irrelevant, of no interest. But the autistic artist or (to be less lofty) the autistic imagination is by no means rare. I have seen a dozen examples of it in as many years, and this without making any particular effort to find them.
The autistic, by their nature, are seldom open to influence. It is their ‘fate’ to be isolated, and thus original. Their ‘vision’, if it can be glimpsed, comes from within and appears aboriginal. They seem to me, as I see more of them, to be a strange species in our midst, odd, original, wholly inwardly directed, unlike others.