An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) (36 page)

The converse of this sudden kindling or turning on is also seen on occasion in the sudden disappearance of savant talents, whether in retarded or autistic savants, or normal individuals with savant capacities. Vladimir Nabokov possessed, in addition to his many other talents, a prodigious calculating gift, but this disappeared suddenly and completely, he wrote, following a high fever, with delirium, at the age of seven. Nabokov felt that the calculating gift, which came and went so mysteriously, had little to do with “him” and seemed to obey laws of its own—it was different in kind from the rest of his powers.

Normal talents do not come and go in this way; they show development, persist, enlarge, take on a personal style as they establish connections, and embed themselves, increasingly, in the mind and personality. They lack the peculiar isolation, uninfluenceability, and automaticity of savant talents.
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100. It is possible for savant and normal talents to coexist, sometimes in separate spheres (as with Nabokov); sometimes, confusingly, in the same sphere. I have had this impression strongly with an extremely gifted young man I have known since infancy. At two, Eric W. could read fluently—but this was not just hyperlexia,—he read with comprehension. At the same age he could repeat any melody he heard, harmonize in singing with it, and had a grasp of fugue and counterpoint. By three he was doing remarkable drawings with perspective. At ten he wrote his first string quartet. He showed great scientific powers in early adolescence, and now, in his early twenties, is doing fundamental work in chemistry. (I never had any sense of Eric W. being autistic—he was full of spontaneity and playfulness as a child, and is full of deep feeling as an adult.) Had he had only savant talents, they would not have been capable of significant development or integration. Had he had only normal talents (at least in the graphic sphere) they would not have been presented in such a savantlike fashion. He has been singularly fortunate in having both.

But a mind is not just a collection of talents. One cannot maintain a purely composite or modular view of the mind, as many neurologists and psychologists now do. This removes that general quality of mind—call it reach or range or size or spaciousness—that is always instantly recognizable in normal people. It is a capacity that seems to be supramodal, and that shines through whatever particular talents there are. This is what we mean when we say that someone has “a fine mind.” A modular view of the mind, no less importantly, also removes the personal center, the self, the “I.” Normally, there is a cohering and unifying power (Coleridge calls it an “esemplastic” power) that integrates all the separate faculties of mind, integrates them, too, with our experiences and emotions, so that they take on a uniquely personal cast. It is this global or integrating power that allows us to generalize and reflect, to develop subjectivity and a self-conscious self.

Kurt Goldstein was especially interested in such a global capacity, which he referred to as the organism’s “abstract-categorical capacity”, or “abstract attitude.” Part of Goldstein’s work was concerned with the effects of brain damage, and he found that whenever there was extensive damage, or damage involving the frontal lobes of the brain, there tended to be, over and above the impairments of specific abilities (linguistic, visual, whatever), an impairment of abstract-categorical capacity—often as damaging as, sometimes far more damaging than, the specific impairments. Goldstein also explored various developmental problems and (with his colleagues Martin Scheerer and Eva Rothmann) published the deepest study ever made of an idiot savant. Their subject, L., was a profoundly autistic boy, with remarkable musical, “mathematical”, and memorial talents. In their 1945 paper “A Case of ‘Idiot Savant’: An Experimental Study of Personality Organization”, they comment on the limitations of a multifactorial, or composite, theory of mind:

[If] there exists—only a composite of individual capabilities which are so independent from each other—L. should have theoretically been able to become a proficient musician and mathematician—Since this contradicts the facts of the case, we have to explain [why he did not]—despite his “interests” and “training.”

He did not, they conclude, because, for all his impressive and real talents, there was something else, something global, irremediably missing:

L. suffers from an impairment of abstract attitude affecting his total behaviour throughout. This expresses itself in the linguistic sphere by his “inability” to understand or to use language in its symbolic or conceptual meaning; to grasp or formulate properties of objects in the abstract—to raise the question “why” regarding real happenings, to deal with fictitious situations, to comprehend their rationale—The same impairment underlies his lack of social awareness and of curiosity in people, his limited values; his inability to register or absorb anything of the socio-cultural and interhuman matrix around him—The same impairment to abstract is evidenced in his [savant] performance—[which] cannot be lifted out of its concrete context for reflection and verbalization—Owing to his impaired abstract attitude, L. cannot develop his endowment, actively and creatively—[It remains] abnormally concrete, specific and sterile; it cannot become integrated with a broader meaning of the subject, nor with social insight—[It] approaches rather a caricature of a normal talent.

If Goldstein’s formulations about idiot savants and autism are generally valid, and if Stephen is indeed lacking, or relatively lacking, in abstract attitude, how much of an identity, or a self, might he be able to acquire? What power of reflective consciousness might be possible for him? To what extent can he learn or be influenced by personal or cultural contact? To what extent can he make such contact? How much can he develop a genuine sensibility or style? How much is any personal (as opposed to technical) development possible for him? What might be the resonances of all this for his art? These and many other questions, which one encounters with the paradox of an immense talent attached to a relatively rudimentary mind and identity, become sharper in the light of Goldstein’s considerations.

In October 1991, I met Stephen in San Francisco. I was struck by how much he had changed since I last saw him—now seventeen, he was taller, handsomer, and his voice deeper. He was excited to be in San Francisco and kept describing the scenes he had seen on television of the 1989 earthquake, in short, haiku-like phrases: “Bridges snapped. Cars crushed. Gas bursting. Hydrants flowing. Gaps opening. People flying.”

On the first day, we climbed to the top of Pacific Heights. Stephen started drawing Broderick Street, which snakes up to the top of the hill. He looked around vaguely while he was drawing, but was mostly engrossed in listening to his Walkman. We had asked him earlier why Broderick snaked, instead of going straight up. He could not say, or see, that it was because of its steepness, and when Margaret said “steep” to him, he just repeated it, echolalically. He still seemed clearly retarded or cognitively defective.

As we walked, we came upon a sudden enchanting revelation of the bay, dotted with ships, and with Alcatraz set like a gem in the middle. But, for a moment, I did not “see” this, I did not see a scene at all, just an intricate pattern of many colors, a highly abstract, uncategorized mass of sensations. Was this how Stephen saw it?

Stephen’s favorite building in San Francisco was the Transamerica Pyramid. When I asked him why, he said, “Its shape”, and then, with an uncertain air, “It’s a triangle, an isosceles triangle—I like that!” I was struck by the fact that Stephen, with his often primitive language, should use the word “isosceles”—though it is typical of autistic people, sometimes in early childhood, that they may acquire geometrical concepts and terms to a far greater degree than personal or social ones.
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101. Freeman Dyson, who has known Jessy Park since she was a child, remarks:

I’ve always felt she was the closest I would ever come to an alien intelligence. Autistic children are so strange and so different from us—and yet you can communicate; there are many things you can talk with her about—[But] she has no concept of her own identity, she doesn’t understand the difference between “you” and “I”—she uses pronouns almost indiscriminately. And so her universe is radically different from mine. Concrete social relations are for her very, very difficult to comprehend. On the other hand, with anything abstract, she has no trouble. So mathematics, of course, is no problem for her, and we can talk very easily about mathematics—I think autism comes about as close as possible to the central problem of exploring the neurological basis of personality. Because these are people whose intelligence is intact, but something at the center is missing
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He has very little explicit understanding of autism—this came out in an unlikely incident on Polk Street. We had, by a million-to-one chance, got behind a car with a license plate that spelled “autism.” I pointed it out to Stephen. “What does that say?” I asked. He spelled it out, laboriously, “A-U-T-I-S-M-2.”

“Yes”, I said, “and that reads?”

“U—U—Utism”, he stuttered.

“Almost, not quite. Not utism—autism. What is autism?”

“It’s what’s on that license plate”, he answered, and I could get no further.

Clearly, he recognizes that he is different, that he is special. He has a veritable passion for Rain Man and, one must suspect, identifies with the Dustin Hoffman character, perhaps the only autistic hero ever widely portrayed. He has the entire soundtrack of the film on tape and plays it continually on his Walkman. Indeed, he can recite large portions of the dialogue, taking every part, with perfect intonation. (His preoccupation with the film and his constant playing of the cassette have not distracted him at all from his art—he can draw wonderfully even though his attention seems to be elsewhere—but it has made him far less accessible to conversation and social contact.)

Going along with Stephen’s obsession with Rain Man is his fervent desire to visit Las Vegas. He wanted, when we got there, to spend time in a casino, as Rain Man had, and not, in his usual way, to see the buildings in town. So we spent a single night there and then, in a 1991 Lincoln Continental, set out across the desert, for Arizona. “He would have preferred a 1972 Chevrolet Impala”, Margaret told me, but this, to Stephen’s disappointment, was not available.

We pulled up to a parking lot near the Grand Canyon—part of the canyon was visible from here, but Stephen’s attention was immediately distracted by the other cars in the lot. When I asked what he thought of the canyon, he said, “It’s very, very nice, a very nice scene.”

“What does it remind you of?”

“Like buildings, architecture”, Stephen answered.

We found a spot for Stephen to draw the North Rim of the canyon. He started to draw, less fluently and assuredly, perhaps, than he would draw a building; but he seemed to extract the basic architecture of the rocks nonetheless. “You’re a genius, Stephen”, Margaret remarked.

Stephen nodded, smiled. “Ya, ya.”

Knowing Stephen’s love of aerial views, we decided to fly over the Grand Canyon in a helicopter. Stephen was excited and kept craning his head in all directions as we flew low through the canyon, skimming the North Rim, and then higher and higher to get a bird’s-eye view of the whole. Our pilot kept talking about the geology and history of the canyon, but Stephen ignored him, and, I think, saw only shapes—lines, boundaries, shadows, shadings, colors, perspectives. And I, sitting next to him, following his gaze, started, I imagined, to see it through his eyes, relinquishing my own intellectual knowledge of the rock strata below, and seeing them in purely visual terms. Stephen had no scientific knowledge or interest, could not, I suspect, have grasped any of the concepts of geology, and yet such was the force of his perceptual power, his visual sympathy, that he would be able to get, and later draw, the canyon’s geological features with absolute precision, and with a selectivity not to be obtained in any photograph. He would get the canyon’s feel, its essence, as he had got the essence of the Matisse.

We set out across the desert once again, and as we climbed toward Flagstaff, the saguaros grew rarer—the last one, a bold loner, stood out at twenty-eight hundred feet. The bleak Bradshaw Range, where silver and gold were found in the eighties, rose to our left. We entered a flat plain covered with prickly pear, with occasional cattle roaming. Horses and burros, and occasionally pronghorn antelope, still roam these plains. The San Francisco Peaks floated high, like vast ships, on the horizon.

“Very nice landscape to put motorcars into”, Stephen remarked. (He had earlier drawn a big green Buick against a backdrop of Monument Valley.) I was amused—and outraged: faced with the sublimest, grandest vista on the planet, Stephen could only think to put motorcars into it!

While I scribbled, Stephen drew cacti; he had seized on them as an emblem of the West, as he had seized on gondolas for Venice, skyscrapers for New York. An animal, probably a rabbit, darted across the road in front of us. Something got into me, and impulsively I cried, “Coypu!” Stephen was taken by the word, its acoustic contours, and repeated it with obvious pleasure a number of times.

The Arizona trip showed us that Stephen could get desert, canyons, cacti, natural scenes, in the same uncanny way as he could get buildings and cities. Most startling of all, perhaps, was an afternoon at the Canyon de Chelly, which Stephen descended with a Navajo artist, who showed him a special, sacred vantage point from which to draw and plied him with the myths and history of his people, how they had lived in the canyon centuries before. Stephen was indifferent to all this but went ahead in his nonchalant way—looking around, muttering and humming to himself—while the Navajo artist sat, hardly moving, consecrated to the act of drawing. And yet, despite their so different attitudes, Stephen’s drawing was manifestly the better and seemed (even to the Navajo artist) to communicate the strange mystery and sacredness of the place. Stephen himself seems almost devoid of any spiritual feeling; nonetheless he had caught, with his infallible eye and hand, the physical expression of what we, the rest of us, call the “sacred.”