An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) (42 page)

109. She was deeply affected, physically shocked, when, during our talk, I imitated a young man with extremely severe Tourette’s syndrome-how, with violent tics, he had put out his own eyes. Expressions of raw impulse, violence, pain, she perceived, reacted to, straightaway. I was reminded of how, in a completely benign way, Shane, with his Tourette’s, had got through to the autistic children at Camp Winston, at a level of emotion and animal sympathy, a level more elemental, more directly conveyable, than that of complex states of mind and perspectives.

When she was younger, she was hardly able to interpret even the simplest expressions of emotion; she learned to “decode” them later, without necessarily feeling them. (Similarly, Dr. Hermelin, in London, had told me a story about an intelligent autistic girl of twelve who came to her and said, of another student, “Joanie is making a funny noise.” Upon going to investigate, Hermelin found Joanie crying bitterly. The meaning of weeping had been completely missed by the autistic girl: she had merely registered it as something physical, “a funny noise.” I was reminded, too, of Jessy Park, and how she was fascinated by the fact that onions could make one weep but was totally unable to comprehend that one could also weep for joy.)
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110. Some autistic people keep dogs, as blind or deaf people may do, to assist their perceptions—in this case, social perceptions. They may use dogs to “read” the minds and intentions of visitors, which they may feel unable to do themselves. I know two autistic people who regard their dogs as having “telepathic” abilities, but of course the abilities of their dogs are merely normal canine ones—and indeed normal human ones—which they themselves lack.

“I can tell if a human being is angry”, she told me, “or if he’s smiling.” At the level of the sensorimotor, the concrete, the unmediated, the animal, Temple has no difficulty. But what about children, I asked her. Were they not intermediate between animals and adults? On the contrary, Temple said, she had great difficulties with children—trying to talk with them, to join in their games (she could not even play peekaboo with a baby, she said, because she would get the timing all wrong)—as she had had such difficulties herself as a child. Children, she feels, are already far advanced, by the age of three or four, along a path that she, as an autistic person, has never advanced far on. Little children, she feels, already “understand” other human beings in a way she can never hope to.

What is it, then, I pressed her further, that goes on between normal people, from which she feels herself excluded? It has to do, she has inferred, with an implicit knowledge of social conventions and codes, of cultural presuppositions of every sort. This implicit knowledge, which every normal person accumulates and generates throughout life on the basis of experience and encounters with others, Temple seems to be largely devoid of. Lacking it, she has instead to “compute” others’ intentions and states of mind, to try to make algorithmic, explicit, what for the rest of us is second nature. She herself, she infers, may never have had the normal social experiences from which a normal social knowledge is constructed. And it may be from this, too, that her difficulties with gesture and language stem—difficulties that were devastating when she was a near-speechless child, and also in the early days of speech, when she mixed all her pronouns up, not able to grasp the different meanings of “you” and “I”, depending on context.

It is extraordinary to hear Temple speak of this time, or to read of it in her book. When she was three, as an outside chance, although her family did not have much belief in its promise, she was sent to a special nursery school for disturbed and handicapped children, and a trial of speech therapy was suggested. Somehow, the school and the speech therapist got through to Temple, rescued her (she later came to feel) from the abyss, and started her on her slow emergence. She remained clearly autistic, but her new powers of language and communication now gave her an anchor, some ability to master what had been total chaos before. Her sensory system, with its violent oscillations of oversensitivity and undersensitivity, started to stabilize a little. There were many periods of backsliding and regression, but it is clear that by the age of six she had achieved fair language and, with this, had crossed the Rubicon that divides high-functioning people like her from low-functioning ones, who never achieve proper language or autonomy. With the access of language, the terrible triad of impairments—social, communicative, and imaginative—began to yield somewhat. Temple started having some contact with others, especially one or two teachers who could appreciate her intelligence, her specialness, and could withstand her pathology—her now-incessant talking and questioning, her strange fixations, her rages. No less crucial was the emergence of some genuine playfulness and creativity—painting, drawing, making cardboard models and sculptures, as well as “unique and creative ways of being naughty.” At eight, Temple was starting to achieve the pretend-play that normal children achieve as toddlers, but the lower-functioning autistic child never achieves at all.

Her mother, an aunt, and several teachers were crucial, but also crucial, on the long journey up, was the slow development that many autistics show; autism, being a developmental disorder, tends to become less extreme as one grows older, and one may learn to cope with it better.

Temple had longed for friends at school and would have been totally, fiercely loyal to a friend (for two or three years, she had an imaginary friend), but there was something about the way she talked, the way she acted, that seemed to alienate others, so that, while they admired her intelligence, they never accepted her as part of their community. “I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. I had an odd lack of awareness that I was different. I thought the other kids were different. I could never figure out why I didn’t fit in.” Something was going on between the other kids, something swift, subtle, constantly changing—an exchange of meanings, a negotiation, a swiftness of understanding so remarkable that sometimes she wondered if they were all telepathic. She is now aware of the existence of these social signals. She can infer them, she says, but she herself cannot perceive them, cannot participate in this magical communication directly, or conceive the many-leveled kaleidoscopic states of mind behind it. Knowing this intellectually, she does her best to compensate, bringing immense intellectual effort and computational power to bear on matters that others understand with unthinking ease. This is why she often feels excluded, an alien.

A crucial event occurred when she was fifteen. She had become fascinated with the squeeze chutes used to hold cattle. A science teacher took her fixation seriously, instead of scoffing, and suggested she actually build her own squeeze chute. From this beginning, he guided her from particular considerations of farm animals and machinery to a general interest in biology and all science. And here Temple, still quite abnormal in her understanding of ordinary or social language—she still missed allusions, presuppositions, irony, metaphors, jokes—found the language of science and technology a huge relief. It was much clearer, much more explicit, with far less depending on unstated assumptions. Technical language was as easy for her as social language was difficult, and it now provided her with an entry into science.

But if there was a resolution at this level, with the focusing of much of her intellectual and emotional energy on science, other tensions, anxieties—even agonies—remained. With the onset of adolescence, Temple started to confront the realization that she might never lead a “normal” life, or enjoy the “normal” satisfactions—love and friendship, recreation and society—that went with it. This realization may be devastating for gifted young autistic people at this stage and has been a cause of depression in some and even of suicide on occasion. Temple dealt with this realization partly by renunciation and dedication: she would be celibate, she decided, and would make science her whole life.

Adolescence also taught her that not only her emotional state but her whole mental and physical being were very finely tuned and could easily be thrown out of balance by certain sensory stimuli, stress, exhaustion, or conflict.
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111. The provocative stimuli may be very different from one person to another: one autistic person will be intolerant of high-pitched noises, another of low-pitched noises, one of a fan, another of a washing machine. There may also be various visual, tactile, and olfactory idiosyncracies.

The hormonal turbulences of adolescence, in particular, threw her up and down. But there was also a passion, an intensity, at this turbulent time; and it was only when she had finished college and was launched on her career, she said, that she could afford to calm down. Indeed, she felt she had to; otherwise her body would destroy itself. At this point, she started on a small dose of imipramine, a drug marketed as an antidepressant. In her book, Temple speaks of the pros and cons of this:

Gone are the frenzied searches for the basic meaning of life. I no longer fixate on one thing since I am no longer driven. During the last four years I have written very few entries in my diary because the anti-depressant has taken away much of the fervor. With the passion subdued, my career and—business is going well. Since I am more relaxed, I get along better with people, and stress-related health problems, such as colitis, are gone. Yet if medication had been prescribed for me in my early twenties, I might not have accomplished as much as I have. The “nerves” and the fixations were great motivators until they tore my body apart with stress-related health problems.

I was reminded, reading this, of what Robert Lowell once told me about being on lithium for his manic-depressive disorder: “I feel much ‘better’ in a way, calmer, stabler—but my poetry has lost much of its force.” While Temple, too, is well aware of the cost of being calmed down, she feels, at this point in her life, that it is well worth paying. Yet she sometimes misses the emotions, the frenzies, she once felt.

The other side of a much-retarded development may be a continuing ability to develop social skills and perceptions throughout life, and the last twenty years have indeed been years of continuing development for Temple. Ten years ago, when she first started lecturing, I had been told, she often seemed not to be addressing the audience—she would have no eye contact and might actually be facing in another direction—and she could not take questions after the lecture. Now she spends almost 90 percent of her time on the road, lecturing around the world, sometimes about autism, sometimes about animal behavior. She has become much more fluent in her lecturing style, has more eye contact with the audience, and may even add humorous asides and improvisations; she answers—and, if need be, parries—questions easily. In her social life, she seems also to have developed, so that most recently, Temple told me, she has been able to enjoy spending time with two or three friends. But achieving genuine friendship, appreciating other people for their otherness, for their own minds, may be the most difficult of all achievements for an autistic person. Uta Frith, in Autism and Asperger Syndrome, writes, “Asperger syndrome individuals—do not seem to possess the knack of entering and maintaining intimate two-way personal relationships, whereas routine social interactions are well within their grasp.” Her colleague Peter Hobson writes of an intelligent but autistic man who could not comprehend the meaning of “a friend.” Yet it seemed to me, as I listened to her, that Temple, now in her forties, had grasped at least something of the nature of friendship.

On this note—we had been walking and talking for almost two hours—we finished our visit to the university farm and took a break for lunch. Temple, it seemed to me, was happy to stop talking, stop thinking for a while; there had been an almost ferocious intensity in the self-examination I had forced on her (although it was not unlike the self-examination she forces on herself daily, struggling, as always, to understand and live with autism in a non-autistic world). “Normality” had been revealed more and more, as we spoke, as a sort of front, or facade, for her, albeit a brave and often brilliant front, behind which she remained, in some ways, as far “outside”, as unconnected, as ever. “I can really relate to Data”, she said as we drove away from the farm. She is a “Star Trek” fan, as I am, and her favorite character is Data, an android who, for all his emotionlessness, has a great curiosity, a wistfulness, about being human. He observes human behavior minutely, and sometimes impersonates it, but longs, above all, to be human. A surprising number of people with autism identify with Data, or with his predecessor, Mr. Spock.

This was the case with the B.’s, the autistic family I had visited in California—the older son, like the parents, with Asperger’s syndrome, the younger with classical autism. When I first arrived at their house, the whole atmosphere was so “normal” that I wondered if I had been misinformed, or if I had not, perhaps, ended up at the wrong house, for there was nothing obviously “autistic” about them or it. It was only after I had settled down that I noticed the well-used trampoline, where the whole family, at times, likes to jump and flap their arms; the huge library of science fiction;
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the strange cartoons pinned to the bathroom wall; and the ludicrously explicit directions, pinned up in the kitchen—for cooking, laying the table, and washing up—suggesting that these had to be performed in a fixed, formulaic way (this, I learned later, was an autistic in-joke).

112. Many high-functioning autistic people describe a great fondness for, almost an addiction to, alternative worlds, imaginary worlds such as those of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, or worlds they imagine themselves. Thus both the B.’s and their older son have spent years constructing an imaginary world with its own landscapes and geography (endlessly mapped and drawn), its own languages, currencies, laws, and customs—a world in which fantasy and rigidity play equal parts. Thus days might be spent computing the total grain production or silver reserves in Leutheria, or designing a new flag, or calculating the complex factors determining the value of a thog—this occupies hours of the B.’s leisure time at home together, Mrs. B. providing the science and technology; Mr. B. the politics, languages, and social customs; and their son the natural features of the often-warring countries.